


Bros Before Ho!Ho!Hos!

by papofglencoe



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bromance, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, F/M, Fluff and Smut, New Year's Eve, Smut, Unrequited Love, Weddings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-05-17 00:14:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5846425
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/papofglencoe/pseuds/papofglencoe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Finnick, Peeta, and Gale attend Thom and Delly’s annual New Year’s Eve bash in the hopes of sending the year out with a bang.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bro the First: Gale Hawthorne

**Author's Note:**

> Rated E for explicit language and sexual situations. With many thanks to three girls on my star squad, @myusernamehere, @dandelion-sunset, and @jennagill for their friendship, support, and betaing skills. I love you girls! 
> 
> For @etherealfinnick.

The house looked like a PG-13 version of a strip club. Thousands of gaudy lights pulsated in time to the “Carol of the Bells.” Thom’s idea, no doubt. A neon sign in the front window cheerfully proclaimed the presence of “Ho!Ho!Hos!” beyond the glass pane, a classic Delly touch if ever there was one. On the snow-covered lawn, a winking plastic Santa, finger knowingly nudging the side of his nose, sat like a pimp in his sleigh. His paunchy gut and rosy cheeks implied a shade or two of debauchery, a taste for something stronger than the occasional Christmas cookie. And the twinkle in his eye suggested he’d been more than a little naughty, too.

There was a fine line between a stripper pole and the North Pole, and Thom and Delly had plowed gleefully through that line, balls out and no looking back.

Finnick half-expected to be greeted at the door by a scantily clad elf in sequined pasties and reindeer antlers—he just hoped Thom wasn’t the elf. There were hardships he could endure in this world, but the sight of Thom’s voluminous manbreasts was decidedly not among them.

“Okay, here’s how this works, broskis,” Finnick said to his friends, flipping up the collar of his wool coat to shield his pretty face against the bracing wind. “Tonight shall henceforth be known as ‘Operation Hit and Quit It.’”

Confidently and without an ounce of trepidation, he sauntered up the narrow walkway, dodging the patches of black ice that covered the cement from where the flanking snow banks had melted down in the afternoon sun.

“Um, yeah. Nobody’s gonna call it that,” his stoic, gray-eyed companion groused under his breath. He walked behind Finnick, his hands hitched in the waist of his pants like a cowboy clutching his holster on his way to a shootout, trying to appear unconcerned and unhurried, the embodiment of quiet swagger. Channeling his inner John Wayne and all that shit.

“Gonna actually agree with Gale on that,” chuckled the third friend, the one with shoulders as broad as a football field. He ran his fingers nervously through his wavy blond hair, clutching a bottle of Jäger to his chest like a protective talisman. Because goddammit—it was New Year’s Eve and _Katniss_ was in there. If he had any chance to “hit it”—and he knew he had no chance, none at all, not tonight, not _ever_ —there’d be no way in hell he’d “quit it.”

Finnick groaned as he climbed the steps of the porch. “Are you guys gonna be total pussies about this? Because if you’re gonna sit around all night pining over Madge and Katniss with your thumbs up your asses like you do every year, then I’m gonna make an executive decision and take us to a bar instead. Because it’s depressing, frankly.”

He rang the doorbell, giving it an aggravated jab, and crammed his hands in his pockets, shivering in the wind. Before Thom or Delly could answer, he pressed on, “Peeta, _fuck_. I’m telling you. Tonight’s the night, my man. You’ve been dancing around it since your nuts dropped, and I think you need to send the year out with a bang. She broke up with Dorkus a couple months ago, so you’ve got no excuse.”

Peeta’s eyebrows shot up as he processed the news. “Wait, she _what_ —”

Before he could finish his question, the front door swung open, their beaming and very pregnant hostess grinning toothily at the trio. “You’re here!” she squealed, as if she’d had no idea they’d been planning to attend her annual party. Like they hadn’t been there every year for the past five years. She flung her arms around Finnick’s shoulders, her eyes pressed closed as she squeezed him as tightly as her belly would allow.

Despite his tendency to backslide into bro speak, Finnick had been one of Delly’s best friends since childhood, standing by her through messy breakups and the death of both her parents. It was a well-known but never publicly discussed secret: Finnick talked like a douche, but he was actually a total marshmallow. “It’s so good to see you,” she breathed, all sincerity and sweetness, an almost comical version of Mrs. Dalloway.

Delly stepped aside to usher them in. Never one for small talk, Gale gave her a perfunctory nod of greeting and followed Finnick toward the sound of laughter and clinking glasses wafting from the basement. Only Peeta lingered at the threshold, holding the bottle of Jägermeister out for her to take.

“For you,” he offered, azure eyes widening as he realized what he said. “I mean—not for _you_ ,” he gestured toward Delly’s stomach. “But for the house.” He scrubbed his face with both hands and added lamely, perhaps to atone for his awkwardness, “Looking good, Del.”

She laughed and gave Peeta an affectionate squeeze on his bicep, trying not to compare his muscle tone to her husband’s lack thereof. (Hey, she was married, not _dead_ , and Peeta had always been more of a brother to her anyway. Such was her justification for copping the occasional feel.)

“She’s here, you know,” she whispered meaningfully, quirking her head toward the basement stairs.

Peeta could feel himself turning a profuse shade of red. Delly was well aware of his crush on Katniss—if you could call an undying love and/or potentially unhealthy fixation a crush. It’s something the two of them had discussed at length throughout the years, but he still cringed every time she brought it up, at the thought of how painfully obvious and pathetic he must seem to everyone there. How probably even Katniss knew and that, at best, she pitied him for it. Katniss had certainly never given him any indication that she was interested in him, not during their school years and not in the years since. And he’d just found out, not more than two minutes ago, that she had broken up with her long-term boyfriend Darius.

It was a lot to process on the spot.

“Is he here too?” Peeta asked, his voice no more than a hoarse whisper.

Delly shook her head, a serene smile toying its way onto her lips like this was all some sort of cosmic plan coming together perfectly. “No, I don’t think we’ll be seeing any more of Darius.”

Peeta grunted—an actual grunt, a sound he couldn’t ever remember making before—in satisfaction. He generally got along with everyone ( _see exhibit A: Gale Hawthorne_ ), but there was something he’d never trusted about Darius. He’d been friendly enough, Peeta supposed, an uncommon trait for one of Katniss’ boyfriends, but there was a seedy salesman quality to him, an aura of untrustworthiness, that made him seem leagues below the affections of Katniss Everdeen.

“What happened?”

Delly shrugged apologetically. “That’s not really for me to say.” Her eyes darted over Peeta’s shoulders, scanning the room behind him to make sure no one had emerged from the basement to eavesdrop on their conversation. She squeezed his forearm and leaned toward him, adding conspiratorially, “But I can say that the breakup was her idea.”

Peeta nodded, feeling grateful for a couple things. “And she’s here alone?”

Delly’s grin was infectious, somehow climbing its way onto Peeta’s face like a rash. “You betcha.”

Okay, so he was grateful for a _few_ things.

“C’mon,” Delly encouraged him, guiding him downstairs by the arm. “At least aim to say hi to her before the year is over, yeah?”

************

**_Gale_ **

 

He shambled down the checkered linoleum stairs toward the sound of Frank Sinatra, keeping his eyes trained straight ahead so that he wouldn’t accidentally make eye contact with her before he was good and ready.

Once a year. That’s how often he got to see Madge Undersee now. And, like every year, this one night of awkward banter, pseudo-sexual jokes, and fleeting glances would have to sustain him through a year’s worth of shitty dates and uncomfortable morning afters with girls who weren’t her, who didn’t come close.

It had gone on like this for years; their meeting at Thom’s and Delly’s party. One year they’d chatted for hours upstairs alone, the TV quietly playing _Shaft_ in the background, unheeded, as she placed her hand on his arm, and he rested his hand on her knee. Another year they’d played beer pong with each other the entire night and somehow managed to go undefeated. When she’d given him a celebratory hug, his fingers had grazed the top of her ass, and she’d moaned into the shell of his ear, bucking her pelvis lightly against his—something he’d masturbated to more times than he cared to remember.

Every year they flirted, and the way her eyes danced across his face, skittering across his lips before falling to the planes of his body and down to his crotch, set him ablaze. He wanted to fuck her and marry her, but their flirtation never went beyond the party.

It couldn’t.

Because she was already married to someone else—and had been since they’d graduated high school. So there was _that_.

Not that he wouldn’t be above sleeping with her, married or not. He’d loved her for as long as he could remember, long before she had married Bristel and become Madge Collier. If there’d been such a thing in reality as the rule of dibs, she’d be his and he’d be hers, and there wouldn’t be anything else to say on the matter. Case closed.

But even if he could take Finnick’s suggestion and finally act on his feelings for her, to confess or kiss her or touch her, there was no way he’d be able to walk away at the end of the night. He’d stand in front of a firing squad for that girl.

At the bottom of the stairs, Finnick turned to him and gave him a reassuring pat across the back. “Go find yourself a shortie. Ideally a new one.” He stalked off before Gale had the chance to point out that at an annual, recurring holiday party among people who’d known each other since grade school, the odds of meeting a new “shortie” weren’t exactly in his favor.

His gray eyes did a vicinity sweep of the room, scanning from one corner to the next to take inventory of the usual suspects. Looking at everyone and no one—and really only looking for her.

Over by the hors d’oeuvres, he saw Clove Kurpinski aggressively spreading cheese onto crackers, the canapé knife digging into the cheese ball every time a syllable oozed out of David Marvel’s odious mouth. Marvel prattled on, making himself laugh, oblivious to the fact that Clove looked ready to gouge his eyes out with the blunted blade. Cashmere and Gloss, who Gale had always assumed to be cousins, were making out on the sofa next to the stereo. Cato Taylor sat alone next to them, stealing furtive glances at one—or both—of their asses, periodically adjusting himself. A couple feet away, Enobaria Davis wolfishly stared down Brutus and some ginger Gale only ever knew as “Foxface” because of her startling similarity to something vulpine and rabid. Enobaria looked like she’d enjoy ripping out both their throats with her bare teeth for having too good of a time together.

Without a second thought, Gale veered away from them, wending his way through the crowded room and heading into the back corner.

A large group of people were congregated around the beer pong table, everyone laughing and shouting boisterously over the music as a still-sober Finnick trounced a decidedly un-sober Thresh. The whole gang was there—Johanna, Castor, Pollux, Rue, Jackson, the Leeg sisters, Boggs, Katniss…

Everyone but Madge.

Of the group, Katniss was the only one hanging back, silently scowling as she clutched a beer-filled solo cup to her chest. Since she looked about as social as Gale felt, he homed in on her.

“Catnip.” He nodded in greeting, crossing his arms against his chest.

Her scowl eased up fractionally at the sight of him. “Gale. How’s it going?”

He shrugged. “Could be worse. You?”

“Could be better.” She took a sip from her cup but declined to explain further. “You here alone?” she asked.

He tipped his chin in the affirmative. “Yeah.” He exhaled heavily, making a sound some might call a sigh. “And you?”

Katniss took another pull from her cup, a gulp this time. “Yeah. Me and Darius…”

“I heard,” he said, cutting her off in an attempt to be helpful. He scanned her face for signs of distress, but, finding none, turned away to watch the drinking game instead while they talked. “So what happened with you two?” he asked. Casual, not at all prying. Not one bit. Peeta’d fucking owe him for this.

One of her shoulders jerked up noncommittally. “We tried for two years, but we just couldn’t give each other what we needed.”

Gale fought back a smirk. “There’s a few ways I could go with that—”

“And any way you’d go, you’d probably be onto something,” she grumbled. She ran a finger along the ring of her cup, staring down into the murky amber liquid as if she were searching for an answer in its depths. “It was a disaster… the games we ended up playing, trying to hurt each other.” She smiled ruefully. “Relationships suck.”

They fell into an awkward silence, neither being particularly good with words or inclined to discuss matters of emotional importance. Katniss broke the silence first, telling him what he really wanted to know. “She’s not here.”

Gale tried to maintain his calm facade even though his heart thundered in his ears at the mere allusion to Madge. Katniss didn’t even have to say her name. His body reacted instinctively, an old habit he worried he’d never break. “I know,” he said, pressing his arms tighter together against his chest as if to protect himself from an arctic wind. “Do you know when she’ll be showing up?” He took his phone out of his pocket, checking the time: _9:36_.

Katniss’ eyes, the same steely shade of gray as Gale’s, locked on him. He hated the pity he saw there. He never could stand to be pitied, and he despised what her eyes told him.

But he didn’t expect her answer when she finally spoke. “Gale—she’s not coming this year. She and Bristel… “ Her voice faltered, breaking off entirely.

He felt impatient, desperate suddenly for her to _fucking_ speak, to tell him what she knew. “They what?” There was a warning edge to his voice, as if to tell her not to say it after all.

But he knew what she was going to tell him, could feel it in his bones. His stomach plummeted in freefall.

“They’re expecting,” she told him, her voice low. “They haven’t told many people yet because they wanted to wait until she was past the first trimester, but she’s been so sick from the morning—”

He held a hand up, unable to hear more, and took a faltering step toward the bar in the corner.

“Gale,” she urged, reaching her hand out to stop him, as if it was her responsibility to explain to him how two people in a loveless marriage could decide to have a child together.

“It’s okay, Catnip,” he said her with a reassurance he didn’t feel. “I—I just need a drink.”

So that was it, then. Madge was never going to leave Bristel. She was going to have his baby. And for what? Out of some sense of duty?

Gale knew what duty meant; he’d made vows and taken oaths too, but what Madge was doing could only be described as a waste.

She’d wasted her life and was wasting his, too.

Gale sidled up to Thom’s bar and took a seat on one of the stools lining the counter. The bar was tucked into the back corner of the basement, adjacent to the furnace room, its proud owner and proprietor slinging drinks to his guests from behind the counter.

“Hey buddy!” he exclaimed at the sight of Gale, ignoring the dour expression on Hawthorne’s face. Thom swiped the counter clean with a dish rag, leaning his elbows on the damp surface. “Glad you could make it.”

Gale tipped his chin in reply and gave a thin-lipped smile. No offense to present company, but he’d like nothing more than to call it a night and spend the rest of his evening in the comfort of his own home, one hand down the waistband of his pants, the other clutching a beer. But since he’d driven with Finnick and Peeta and was, for all intents and purposes, shackled to them, he figured he’d spend the rest of his night on his ass, right here, drinking at the bar.

All roads lead to inebriation.

“What’s on draft?” he asked to make small talk—something he really didn’t want to have to do but that common courtesy required. He shifted uncomfortably on the hard wooden stool, accidentally knocking his shoulder against whoever was sitting next to him. “‘Scuse me,” he mumbled without bothering to look.

Thom’s face beamed at the question. He looked happier than a proverbial pig in shit. “It’s a winter ale I brewed up… dry hopped, so it’s got a nice citrusy flavor. One of my best yet, in my humble opinion. Whaddya say, sis?” Thom’s eyes locked on the person to Gale’s left, waiting for a reply. In the handful of years he’d known Thom, he had never once heard mention of a sister, much less seen one. Morbidly curious about what a female Thom would even look like, he swiveled in his stool to take a proper look.

He’d assumed when he sat down that the person next to him was a guy. Why he had thought this, he had no idea. He was a _she_ , and most obviously so. She was of slight frame, with narrow, sloping shoulders and slender hips. Her form-fitting black dress was short, barely covering the swell of her ass. Her blond hair cascaded in soft waves over her right shoulder, framing a heart-shaped face with wide blue eyes and a pert nose.

Thank Christ she didn’t look a thing like Thom. The world could only handle so much of that.

He couldn’t help it—he felt ridiculously adolescent about it—but the sight of her sent blood stampeding to his groin. He’d never been stricken so immediately, so intensely, by the sight of someone before. At the cellular level, coded into his DNA, his body reacted to the woman who sat next to him.

And then she swiveled in her chair to face him directly.

His stomach lurched uncomfortably at what he saw; he’d never realized how closely related attraction and repulsion could be. A green vine, decorated with thorns and leaves, crawled along the left side of her neck, disappearing beneath the neckline of her dress and reappearing on the bare flesh of her left thigh. The tattoo disappeared again mid-calf, beneath the soft black leather of her boots. The left side of her head was shaved, her scalp covered in the offending vine.

She was pierced in more places than he could count: her lower lip, her nostril, her eyebrow, all along the cartilage of her ear, including a long bar that spanned from the top of her ear to the side. And that’s just what he could see.

Every piercing, every line of ink, was on her left-hand side. Gale couldn’t begin to imagine what that meant, if there was a method to the madness.

She stared at him impassively, looking equally unimpressed by what she saw. No matter. She wasn’t his type either.

Thom cleared his throat after a lengthy pause. “Cres?”

She tore her clear blue eyes away from Gale and looked at her brother. “Yeah, the beer’s great,” she said, her voice even and affectless. She neither pandered nor pissed on his parade—she told him directly, without prevarication, what she thought, nothing more. Her tone was commanding and confident. Gale thought she sounded like a woman who could appreciate a fine scotch, who would just as soon not waste her time on her brother’s exceptionally average homebrewed beer.

Thom nodded, satisfied by the verdict. “Gale, this is my stepsister Cressida. Cres, this is one of Del’s old friends from school, Gale Hawthorne.” Hitching a thumb toward Cressida, he added, “She came to visit this year for Christmas. Flew in all the way from Chicago.” He slid a glass of beer across the counter to Gale. “Here, try summa this. Let me know whatcha think.”

Thom’s attention was called away by Delly, who had approached the bar in what could only be described as the trademark pregnant lady waddle. That left Gale alone with Cressida. The way she looked at him, like she could see into every nook and cranny of his mind and was skeptical about the worth of anything she saw, was deeply unsettling.

Gale cleared his throat and took a swig of beer. “So you live in Chicago?”

“Yep.”

Her response was simple, and Gale might have thought she didn’t want to be bothered anymore by him except that she kept her body squarely facing his. She waited for him to continue, pushing him to say something less inane.

“I ah… have a buddy who lives there. Works for the Chicago PD.”

She arched her pierced eyebrow at this, and as she did, he noticed that she had three jagged lines tattooed across her brow, marked like some feral creature had clawed at her. “A pig?” she asked, smirking. “Let me guess. He likes to arrest homeless people and thirteen-year-old kids for skateboarding.”

Gale felt heat rising to his face at her words, his temper flaring at the provocation. “Is that what you think of cops? That we just bully people?”

She spluttered on a mouthful of beer, trying not to choke on it. “Shit—you said ‘we’? You’re a _cop_? I knew there was something not quite right about you.”

Gale scowled at her but tried not to show her how aggravated she’d made him. He wasn’t naive enough to think everyone understood or even respected his job, but that didn’t mean she had to be a dick about her opinion. “What?” he said derisively. “You couldn’t tell? I must’ve left my cloven hooves at home.”

Cressida gave a short laugh, spinning her bar stool back toward the bar. Conversation over.

For some reason, that thought was unbearable to Gale. He didn’t know why he should care about her opinion, but he did.

“I might be a cop, but that doesn’t make me a fascist.”

“Hey, whatever helps you sleep at night,” she countered.

He snickered, beyond fucking annoyed by this woman’s attitude. “So tell me, Cressida, what’s your _noble_ profession?”

She reached across the counter, scooching a bowl of nuts toward her. “I’m a director.” She tossed a handful in her mouth.

He rolled his eyes. The artistic type—talk about being a walking cliche. “Okay, so let me guess… You make thought-provoking exposes about the fast food industry. Or,” and now he could feel himself really getting on a roll, “even better… documentaries on revolutions in third world countries… You know. Because it _helps you sleep at night_.”

“The global south,” she muttered under her breath, almost inaudibly.

He leaned toward her. “Excuse me, what did you say?” He meant to sound confrontational, truly, but at this distance he could breathe in the scent of her perfume, some rich blend of vanilla and clove, and it made his thoughts hazy and indistinct.

“I said, ‘the global south.’” She swiveled in her chair to stare him at him directly, her face no more than a foot from his—mere inches, really. As she spoke, Gale’s gaze fell to her lips. The lower lip was fuller than the top, and they looked wet, freshly licked. He watched her lips move, each syllable a weapon aimed directly at him. “If you don’t want people to mistake you for a fascist, then you shouldn’t use outmoded and socially degrading terms coined by the fucking USSR to dismiss people who live differently from you.”

He wanted to snarl at her, to throw his beer in her face like a petulant child. And maybe, just a little, he wanted to kiss her, if only to shut her up. “For fuck’s sake,” he growled, clutching his beer and downing it in one angry gulp. “Enough already.”

Sliding off the bar stool, he stalked away, hackles raised. It was bad enough he had to spend his evening here; he shouldn’t have to suffer insults and jibes by some obnoxious bohemian reeking of Nag Champa.

As he walked away, he might have heard the sound of soft laughter sending him off.

For exactly the next hour and thirty four minutes, he stewed on the conversation. He simmered and worked himself up to a boil as he pounded one beer after another, thinking of the rebuttals and insults he’d like to hurl Cressida’s way. How living in a big city didn’t make her the center of the world or the moral authority on anything. How a hipster haircut, an apparent disregard for bodily pain, and a professed disdain for social order didn’t make her more enlightened or worthy. She benefited from the system as much as anyone else.

He’d long since ceased to dwell on Madge’s absence, or even to note it. When Katniss approached him at a quarter to midnight and asked him how he was holding up, it didn’t cross his mind what she meant.

“Catnip, can I ask you a question?” He had to lean close to her and yell it over the din of the drunken crowd. His speech came out slightly slurred, a caricature of his normal voice. As he bent down and slung an arm across her shoulder, partially to prevent himself from falling over, he noticed a look of panic wash over her face. Her body tensed up as she made to step back from him.

“What the hell—Katniss, did you think I was going to kiss you?”

She stared up at him in horror, her mouth forming a silent “o,” her normally olive skin ashy and pale. “Yeah… I kind of did. I’m sorry… it’s just…”

Gale laughed and shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t do that to Peet. Anyway, I wanted to ask you what you call Africa.”

He watched the frown lines form on Katniss’ forehead and through his drunken haze wondered what he’d said wrong, if she hadn’t understood the question. “ _Africa_ , Katniss. _What do you call it_?”

“Um… I guess I call it Africa? But, Gale, when you said you wouldn’t do that to—”

He rolled his eyes and squeezed her shoulder. “No, I mean, what do you call _it_?”

She shook her head, trying again. “A continent? So, Gale, back to what you said a second ago…”

“It’s a third world country, Katniss, that’s what it is. And Cressida over there,” he pointed without looking to the empty bar stool Cressida had long since vacated. “She called it… fuck… what did she call it again?” He pinched the bridge of his nose and looked around the crowded room, scanning it, desperate to ask her. “Forget it, Catnip. I gotta go ask Cressida.”

No matter where he looked or who he asked, he couldn’t find her. It was like she had never existed; she was simply gone. It was like she was dropped into his world for five minutes to screw with his head for all of time.

Ridiculous.

Finally he gave up and, pushing his way through the throng, escaped out of the sliding glass doors into Thom and Delly’s backyard. The night was cold, the air bracing, and in the silence he could finally hear himself think. Out here he felt halfway sober.

After a moment, he heard the striking of a lighter and the deep inhalation of breath. He whirled around and saw Cressida’s silhouette backlit by the flickering Christmas lights. She leaned nonchalantly against a low brick wall, smoking a cigarette, the orange glow of it playfully illuminating her face.

Of course she’d be a smoker.

“Hey,” he said, sounding winded, like he was the one that had a pack-a-day habit.

“Hey yourself,” she replied. He closed his eyes and soaked up the sound of her voice, its low and soothing tone. His eyes snapped open when she continued to speak. He hadn’t expected her to say anything else to him. “You here to arrest me for smoking within fifteen feet of the building, officer?”

He was about to say something asshole-ish when he caught it—the mischievous expression in her eyes, the smile tugging at the corner of her lips.

“You’re fucking with me, aren’t you? You were fucking with me earlier, too.”

She laughed and nodded, taking a long draw from her cigarette. He wanted to take it and toss it on the ground, grind it beneath the heel of his boot. It was a filthy habit. He couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t stand her.

“I should be sorry,” she said, not sounding at all sorry. “It’s just… you’re easy to fuck with. I kind of like it.”

The words lodged in his gut, the way she said _fuck_ binding him into knots, completely useless and prostrate at her feet.

“So the whole fascist pig, third world country stuff…”

“Well,” she admitted, “I did mean _some_ of it, but you don’t seem like anything I couldn’t handle.”

In that moment he knew, he absolutely knew without a doubt, that she could handle him, manage him, do whatever she wanted to or with him. It made no sense at all. She was completely wrong for him. And he was probably extremely drunk, but he knew she was something he wouldn’t regret, even if he came to hate her.

“Wanna grab a drink?” he asked, his voice the sound of metal scraping on metal, a pick axe striking solid rock.

She stubbed her cigarette out on the wall, flicking the butt carelessly into the neighbor’s shrubs, and walked toward him. He winced as he watched the butt fly through the air, biting his tongue from pointing out how rude it was to do that.

“I think that’s probably a terrible idea,” she whispered, reaching out and placing her palm on his chest. Her cold fingers felt like fire irons searing his flesh. “So… okay. Let’s.”

He grabbed her wrist, firmly but gently, and pulled her body flush against his. He couldn’t be sure if his mouth found hers or if her mouth found his, but before he could rationalize what was happening, their mouths were pressed harshly against each other, their tongues battling for dominance. He bit her lower lip, sucking it into his mouth to nurse it when she hissed in pain, her freezing hands winding their way beneath his shirt to warm themselves against the skin of his abdomen. The muscles of his stomach twitched in delicious agony, and he groaned into her mouth, wanting her. Wanting all of her, the beautiful and the ugly.

As their mouths and hands danced, pulled, scratched, bit, tugged, the sound of cheers and whistles erupted from within the house. Noisemakers pealed in the new year, the voices of their friends drunkenly improvising the lyrics to _Auld Lang Syne_. Gale had forgotten all of them, everything but Cressida. The sum total of his world was in his grasp.

She was nothing he had ever wanted. And she was everything.

 

 

 

 

 

_Peeta’s and Finnick’s stories to be continued…_


	2. The Beta Bro: Peeta Mellark

He’d spent half an hour talking about knives with Clove Kurpinski, pretending to weigh the pros and cons of German versus Japanese steel, before the thought occurred to him that maybe she wasn't looking to invest in knives for cooking but other, less savory extracurricular activities instead. Once the idea came to him, it’s not like he could _unthink_ it.

He got away from her as quickly as he could, a specific part of him immeasurably glad to remain intact.

After that he'd been roped into a conversation with Cato Taylor, who had insisted on waxing poetic about the glory and might of Ben Roethlisberger and the Steelers. This was followed by an interminable sales pitch by David Marvel about the necessity of a comprehensive life insurance plan so that he wouldn't leave his nonexistent wife and their equally nonexistent children to fend for themselves in the event of his untimely demise.

Frankly, the whole night so far had him looking forward to an untimely demise.

Peeta would steal occasional glances at Katniss— according to his phone, which he periodically pulled out of his pocket to consult, approximately once every fifteen minutes.

Okay, that was bullshit. It was more like once every ten. Regardless, Peeta was making a concerted effort to play it cool and not to stare, even if his eyes rebelled against him at regular and increasingly frequent intervals.

Katniss seemed to be having an okay enough time, nursing the same cup of beer she’d clutched in her hands all night while chatting with their friends. The expressions her face made fascinated him: the two little frown lines that appeared between her brows whenever she really concentrated on listening, the way her smile reminded him of a sunbreak— of clouds cracking apart for the light— whenever she laughed, the constant vacillation between amusement and annoyance that subtly shifted every one of her features, not so much changing them as painting them a new shade.

She’d braided her hair tonight, two plaits delicately pinned up in the same way they’d been the first time he saw her, back in the eighth grade, when he’d transferred to Seneca Middle School. She hadn’t altered much over the years, hadn’t grown any taller or much curvier, but something about her had become softer, gentler. Whereas time had the tendency to sharpen and harden most people, it seemed to have the opposite effect on Katniss Everdeen. She still scowled plenty— was known for her sharp tongue when she chose to speak at all— but some sort of vulnerability had crept into her that hadn’t been there before.

Her forest green shift dress fell to mid-thigh, the smooth olive skin of her legs remained bare. Through the lace sleeves of her dress he thought he could see a tattoo on her wrist, something that looked like an arrow, maybe, but he couldn't be sure. And he wanted to be sure, to see it and know it. He envied the ink that had gotten under Katniss’ skin.

It was already after eleven when he finally plucked up the courage to talk to her. He didn’t want to have some shabby “Hey, how’ve you been?” “How’s work,” “So how about that weather, huh?” conversation. He could have that conversation with anyone— had, in fact, had that identical conversation with about twenty _anyones_ tonight. He wanted to know her, wanted to be known by her. It didn’t seem so much to ask, but it was the sort of wish that could cost him everything. All it would take from her was one word, one leveling stare, to reduce him to rubble. He felt his guts brace for the impact of rejection. Because, as far as he knew, that’s what happened when you put yourself out there to the person you’d always wanted: they destroyed you.

He had no fucking idea what he was going to say to her.

Through the thick crowd and the crush of bodies squeezed together— laughing, sweating, dancing, and, in Gloss and Cashmere’s case, overzealously dry humping against the knotty pine wall— he spotted her. For the first time all night, she was alone, making her way to the long card table set out for appetizers and punch. Her saw her ladle out a portion of the pink, foamy punch and take a sip, chuckling to himself as she grimaced at its overly liquored taste. When she’d covertly deposited the still-full glass behind an artificial tree, he forced his legs to move. They felt like dead tree trunks, mouldering stumps bogged down by moss and muck, stubbornly clinging to the ground by roots that had long since ceased to serve any useful purpose.

“‘Sorry, I’ll… uh… yeah. Later. I’ve... uh… there’s one thing,” he bellowed over the music, making some sort of stammering half-apology to Annie Cresta, the girl he’d been sitting next to on the shabby sofa for the past twenty minutes. In his panic, through the anxiety mingled with equal parts excitement and dread, he’d forgotten how to speak in complete sentences.

“No problem, Peeta.” She rubbed his knee reassuring and smiled benevolently at him like he was a guileless child and she could follow the direction of his thoughts, a trail of breadcrumbs leading straight to his heart’s most ardent desire. _She knows_ , he groaned inwardly. _The whole damn room knows_.

He pushed his way through the crowd, angling his broad shoulders to squeeze between people too drunk or oblivious to notice he was trying to get by. A few people smacked him jovially on the back, hooting “Hey Peet,” or “‘Sup, bro,” but he could barely hear them over the thundering in his ears, could hardly acknowledge them through the constriction in his throat. The closer he got to her, the quieter the rest of the room became.

By the time he finally reached her the room had fallen silent, the chittering and chirping of the other guests swallowed by the hush of anticipation. Everyone was frozen around them, or perhaps they had vanished altogether, lost in an earlier era, another time. The time before _this_. It felt monumental, like this was the fulcrum upon which something in his world had just tipped.

Her back was turned to him, the smooth skin of her shoulder visible through the lace of her dress. Reaching out, he touched her there, allowing himself to relish for a second the sensation of her cool skin against the heat of his palm, the feel of her dress’ coarse fabric on his flesh.

She whirled around, her dark gray eyes widening at the sight of him.

“Peeta?” she said, or at least he thought she said. He couldn’t be exactly sure. Her right cheek was puffed out, pocketing something inside of it like a chipmunk. Her right hand shot up to cover her mouth, her left still clutching the ants on a log she’d been eating. The edge of the celery was serrated from her teeth, a small dollop of peanut butter smeared on the delicate web of skin between her thumb and index finger.

Peeta couldn’t help it, but there was something so absurd about this moment he had to laugh. Here they were. He’d finally worked up the nerve to talk to her, and he’d caught her plowing through a kid’s snack, mouth full and glued shut with peanut butter.

Christ, he was so gone for her.

At the sound of his laugh, he noticed a pink flush creep up her neck, delicious, candy-colored mottles and splotches he wanted to taste. She looked down at her hand, abashed, scanning the table for somewhere to place the half-eaten snack, finding nowhere except the tray she’d taken it from. She kept in her hand; three raisins stupidly perched on a bed of peanut butter.

“Hey, Katniss, good to see you.”

He didn’t know who had said that, some self-assured bastard who couldn't possibly have been him but who seemed to have his voice.

He shifted his weight awkwardly, unsure what to do next, wanting to hug her but not sure if would make things better or worse.

“It’s good to see you too,” she said, the tone of her voice, its warmth and gentle cadence, making his mind up for him.

He’d hugged her once before, at high school graduation, years ago. That had been different, just a casual sling of arms, two shapeless bodies in robes as baggy as trash bags, the cheap synthetic fabric of their regalia crinkling noisily from the pressure. It was a hug of two acquaintances saying goodbye and good luck and “it was nice almost knowing you.”

It was nothing like this.

This hug was the press of her ear against his as he leaned down, the heat of her breath fanning over the nape of his neck. It was the bones of her shoulders, delicate and fragile under his hands, five nearly agonizing currents where the fingers of her right hand connected with his spine. It was brief. It smelled of peanut butter. He might actually _have_ peanut butter now on the back of his shirt. But he didn’t care because it was perfection.

So _that_ was what it felt like to hold Katniss Everdeen.

He pulled away regretfully, already missing the press of her body against his.

“How’ve you been?” she asked, popping the rest of the celery stick into her mouth, chewing aggressively, as if to be done with it.

Peeta grabbed one off the tray for himself as he answered so that Katniss wouldn't see the look of disappointment in his eyes, the dreadful conviction that this conversation would go the same way as every other one they’d ever had.

“Good. I’ve been good. You?”

She nodded as she chewed like she’d been asked to describe in five words or less what the meaning of life was. Her hand rolled in front of her in a circular fashion, over and over, willing her jaw to work faster. When she finally spoke, it was what he had expected and feared. “I’m good.”

So much _good_. Too much _good_. A lie. That answer was almost always a lie, a detour sign in the middle of the road forcing you to take another route. It didn’t care if you ever found your way back to where you wanted to go. It just wanted to send you on your way.

There was a pause, a fraction of a second in which neither of them spoke and just stood there, smiling at each other in a pantomime of social interaction.

Before he could find the right words to ask her what he wanted to say, she chimed in. “So, uh, how’s work been for you?”

He was an art teacher.

He loved his job.

He didn’t want to fucking talk about his job.

“Um, yeah, it’s good,” he replied, feeling impatient at the niceties, wanting to get to something real. He could ask her about her job in return; she was a forest ranger. And as much as he wanted to know about her job— about how many cups of coffee she had each morning before she could drag her ass away from her desk; who her work husband was, what his deal was, why that jackwad couldn’t find his own girl; how many hours a day she spent tromping through the woods or on well-blazed trails; if her boss was a dick; if she aspired to run the National Park Service someday, something he could totally see her doing— what he really wanted to know was if he could take her out for a cup of coffee sometime, if he could kiss her, if he could fuck her until it was his name, his name, only his name that she was capable of thinking.

He pointed to the discarded plastic cup on the floor and smiled crookedly at her, his grin widening as her smile involuntarily matched his. “Not feeling like much of a pirate tonight?”

She glanced down at it, clearing her throat in disgust. “Ugh... no. I’m driving. And besides, who needs that much rum anyway?”

“Well, Delly and Thom aren’t exactly known for their subtlety, are they?” he asked with a self-conscious smirk. Like he was one to talk.

Katniss laughed, a rare, sweet melody he knew note for note, each one lodging itself in a cavernous place deep inside him. “Tell me about it,” she groaned, looking over her shoulder to make sure neither host was within earshot. When she looked back at Peeta, she leaned in conspiratorially, so close to him he could see the white ribboned flesh of an old scar winding a path down the side of her neck. “I mean, did you see what they did to their house? There’s an iceberg-melting number of lights on it.”

Peeta laughed, trying not to dwell on her scar or where it came from. “I bet airlines have been using it for navigation. ‘ _Trying to get to Buffalo? Head due north from Thom and Delly’s house_.’”

She grinned wordlessly in reply, two dimples appearing on the right side of her cheek. He’d never noticed them before, but now that he knew about them he wanted to see how often he could make them appear. He could make that his life’s mission, if she’d let him.

“Well, I guess we should be thankful they haven’t insisted we start wearing ugly Christmas sweaters to these things.” She crossed her arms against her chest at her words, the swell of her breasts rising slightly above the low neckline of her dress.

Yes, he was thankful. So very, very thankful.

“Wait, they didn’t?” he mock frowned, looking down to pull at his dark maroon sweater. It was close-fitting and wool and also currently smothering the life out of him.

He felt so corny and cliched, ineptly trying to flirt with her, that he didn’t know how she could stand it. But the sound of her laugh brought his eyes back up to meet hers, and he didn’t care if she noticed the surprise in them or their blatant adoration of her.

“Sure,” she replied, rolling her eyes. “Like you couldn’t pull off an ugly sweater.” Her eyes darted away. Peeta noticed her biting the inside of her cheek, the way it became concave as she tried and failed not to smirk as some thought crossed her mind.

Maybe it was the heat of the room or his Wookie-of-a-sweater suffocating him, but he felt flushed and clammy and in desperate need of a drink of something— anything— even Delly’s toxic punch. Maybe it was the foolish hope that Katniss was thinking about pulling off his clothes.

He was just about to compliment the way she looked tonight and ask her to go grab a drink over by the bar when a droll, harsh voice barked at his back, its owner wrapping an arm flirtatiously around his waist. “Well if it isn’t the light of my life.”

He looked down at the impish girl who had attached herself to his hip. Her dark eyes gleamed devilishly, dangerously up at him. There could be no doubt about it: Johanna Mason was up to shit.

She looked between Peeta and Katniss, feigning innocence. “What, am I interrupting something?”

Peeta noticed a dark look, something a shade less severe than a glower but nothing so sweet as a scowl, work its way onto Katniss’ face. Her gaze fell to Johanna’s hand and where it rested around his waist.

Johanna didn’t wait for a reply before she stepped between them, her arm still wrapped around Peeta, and used a plastic cup from the nearby stack to scoop a healthy measure of punch into it, foregoing the ladle altogether. She threw her head back, downing the punch in an unbroken series of chugs, and then refilled her glass the same way. From what Peeta had heard, germs, backwash, and hygiene weren’t words in Johanna Mason’s vocabulary.

Smacking her lips in satisfaction, she turned to Katniss. “So, did Darius finally get all his crap out of your apartment?”

She was never much one for the social graces either.

Katniss scowled at Johanna, the flush crawling up her neck again at the mention of her ex. “Yeah,” she mumbled, staring down at her shoes.

“Dumbass took long enough.” Johanna’s fingers squeezed Peeta’s waist, and he fought the urge to squirm away. They felt like daggers, little blades stabbing him to prove a point.

Katniss was barely audible over the din. “Guess he finally got the idea it was over.” She pried her eyes off the ground and gazed absently at the flickering television screen mounted on the opposite wall, over Peeta’s shoulder. “Had been for a while,” she added as an afterthought. She briefly looked at her friend before her attention was drawn back to the screen.

Johanna seemed uninterested in pursuing the topic, apparently having heard all she wanted to know about it. She took another swig of punch. “So what were you guys talking about?”

“Not much,” Peeta answered casually, using his newfound desire for booze as an excuse to disentangle himself from Johanna’s grasp. “We were just commenting on Thom and Delly’s... excess... of holiday spirit.”

“Ohhhhh,” Johanna mused. “You mean the inflatable Thomas the Tank Engine on their lawn that looks like a massive dildo?”

Peeta spluttered, nearly choking on his drink. The three of them burst out laughing, the suddenness and force of the outburst drawing curious looks from the other guests around them.

“I hadn’t noticed that before,” Katniss frowned, the lines on her forehead appearing as she considered it. “But those inflatable lawn decorations do look a lot like blow up dolls.”

“Speaking of blowing,” Johanna quipped, not missing a beat before going in for the kill, “you here alone again, Mellark? Because don’t tell me _you’re_ having a hard time getting laid.”

She batted her eyelashes at Peeta and shot him a saccharine smile that looked remarkably like the Cheshire Cat. It was all teeth and mischief, self-satisfaction and gums.

He swallowed thickly, feeling the blood rush to his face. _Fucking Johanna_. For as long as he had known her, she had never been one to miss out on the opportunity to make a situation as awkward as possible. It was like she thrived on tension and pregnant pauses— like her favorite food of choice was freeze-dried fun. And she was about as subtle as an ax to the skull. She thought she was doing him a favor, he had little doubt of that. But what she was actually doing was annihilating what slight chance he might have had of being able to ask Katniss Everdeen out on a date.

Because no— to answer her question— he didn’t have a particularly hard time getting dates. Or laid. Historically speaking, anyway. But he’d never been even remotely tempted to bring a date or girlfriend to Delly and Thom’s party. It wouldn’t have been right when the only thing he’d be able to think about the entire night was how to get near Katniss. As the years had gone on, his desire had bled into the weeks leading up to and following the party. It had infected him, day by day, week by week— the anticipation and anxiety of seeing her and then the disappointment of seeing her leave with someone else. It was to the point where he didn’t feel right dating someone within a two-month window of the party. Because what kind of dick would do that when they knew something fundamental within themselves belonged to another person? And, however hopeless his case might he, he was undeniably, comprehensively hers.

Katniss snorted at Johanna’s words and shifted her weight uncomfortably from foot to foot. “Christ, Johanna. Rude much?” She shot her friend a look that held all the focus and firepower of a ballistic cruise missile and then turned to Peeta. “You don’t have to answer that. Really.”

When her eyes locked on his, Peeta’s stomach recoiled at what he saw in them. Concern. Solicitude. Or was it pity? He could never tell what they expressed or concealed. That had always been the problem with her.

Was she protecting him? Did she think he was a broken thing, some reject from the island of misfit toys? Did she know about his feelings for her? Did she somehow know he couldn’t bear to touch another woman while the image of her was still fresh in his mind? Was she sparing him the misery of admitting he kind-of-sort-of-completely-hopelessly loved her?

Johanna pressed on, undeterred and putting on a pisspoor show of innocence. “What? All I’m saying, Peeta, is that if you find yourself alone at midnight, I’m more than happy to scratch that itch for you.” She glanced around the room, gesturing vaguely to the other women she saw around them. She pointed to everyone, it seemed, _but_ Katniss. “I bet half the women here would be happy to be your special friend tonight.”

He didn’t care about half. He only cared about one.

Johanna flashed a wink Peeta’s way and reached over to scoop up more punch into her cup. “One for the road, so to speak,” she said, moseying along on her way like she hadn’t just dropped a category five hurricane into the middle of their conversation.

When she left, she took all sound with her. Whereas the room had been blissfully, magically silent before, just Katniss and Peeta held fast in a world spinning around them, now the silence was _between_ them. It was the pall of a devastating embarrassment, the stillness at the eye of a storm.

He couldn't look at her. She was too bright, too radiant, so he chose instead to focus on his hideously pink punch.

“Well,” Katniss said, clearing her throat after several mortifying seconds. She looked longingly toward the beer pong table, where Finnick was trouncing Brutus and putting on a merry show of it.

“Well,” Peeta replied, smiling at her apologetically. _That’s it, then_ , he thought, feeling deflated.

There was always next year, he consoled himself, ignoring the gnawing fear that by then there would be a new smarmy boyfriend, another creep in a long line of _not-good-enoughs_ and _what-the-fucks_.

He put on a brave face and hoped she didn’t notice he was half the man he had been a few minutes ago. “It was good seeing you again,” he told her, never hating that word more in his life— that vapid, facile word, unparalleled in its meagerness.

Whatever _good_ was, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t crushing loneliness or pining across space and time. It wasn’t knowing what Katniss felt like in his arms and not being able to have that every day of his life. _Good_ wasn’t flying near the sun and getting your ass incinerated.

_This_ was terrible. But it could have been great.

“Yeah, good seeing you too.” She nodded, seeming to consider saying something else but then reconsidering. “Take care, all right?” She didn’t wait for Peeta to reply. She pressed her lips into a thin line and darted away, her slight frame disappearing into the crowd.

And just like that, he lost her.

Peeta slinked back to the couch, dodging the pats on his back and the hoots and hellos, to claim the still-empty spot next to Annie Cresta. He landed heavily, the weight of his body causing the wine in Annie’s glass to slosh dangerously close to the rim.

“So that went pretty much how I expected,” he admitted, rubbing the sweat from his palms onto his pant legs. He spoke the words out loud, mostly to himself. He didn’t care if Annie heard because, of course, she already knew.

She sighed and put an arm around his shoulder, squeezing supportively, and sipped from the glass of vino veritas. Her face was flushed a bright pink, and between its color and her uncharacteristic handsiness, Peeta considered confiscating her drink so that a creep like Cato wouldn't try to take advantage of her. Where were her wingmen?

“I don’t know, Peeta,” she mused, her voice an ethereal air that somehow managed to carry through the din of the room. “She seemed pretty happy to be talking to you.”

“Oh?” he asked, staring straight ahead, not really feeling comforted by Annie’s hollow words. “How so?”

She patted his shoulder like a mother burping a baby, firmly and with intent. After searching for an answer for several moments she offered, “Well, she didn’t scowl that much.”

Peeta huffed out a half-hearted laugh. “I guess that’s something.”

But it didn’t feel like anything.

He watched as Gale shambled up to Katniss and slung an arm around her shoulder, leaning in to whisper in her ear. He knew his friend was shitfaced, could see it in his gait and in the way his eyes squinted like Clint Eastwood preparing for a shootout at high noon.

His friend would never make a move on Katniss. At least, not in the cold light of day, not when he was sober. But New Year's Eve comes with its own set of rules and imperatives. No one _wants_ to be alone at midnight, to stand there awkwardly with one hand jammed in their pants playing pocket pool, the other clutching a flute of cheap champagne that tastes like some unholy blend of rubbing alcohol and toilet water. It’s a human instinct to seek out a companion, someone— anyone— to share a fleeting kiss with at midnight. It’s an innate desire to feel someone’s breath on your lips, the heat of their body igniting hope for the next year. Everyone needs someone to hold onto when they greet the unknown.

As Peeta sat there, watching his friend make a move on the girl he’d always loved, he could feel the knot of jealousy binding itself in his gut, coiling over and over until it hurt to be made of blood and intestines and bone, until the mere act of breathing physically pained him. There were holes in his lungs, gaping wounds where the air leaked out and abandoned him.

When it became clear enough to him that Gale wanted to kiss Katniss and that she wasn’t going to turn him away, Peeta stood up and stalked over to the bathroom, which was mercifully empty. He shut the door behind him and locked it, moving over to the vanity to stare at his reflection in the mirror above the sink.

_Fifteen minutes_.

He had to hide in here for fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes that would feel like a lifetime. It was, in fact, a lifetime he was saying goodbye to. The voices outside the door laughed and hollered, sang and squealed and yelled good-natured obscenities, and while they carried on, oblivious to his torture, he looked in the mirror and bid goodbye to his youth and naivete and every childish dream and fantasy he’d ever had.

Peeta breathed deeply, his hands clutching the edge of the sink, and looked at himself in the mirror to anchor him to reality.

Here was what was real: Katniss would never love him. She would never be his. She was destined to be someone else’s— or no one’s at all. She might even be Gale’s.

But there was no universe in which she would ever be his girl.

As he gazed in the mirror he made his New Year’s resolution. It was simple. It was impossible. It was this:

He wouldn’t do it again. He wouldn’t come back next year hoping _this is the year that everything will change_. It would never change, and he had to find a way to accept that and live his life, to actually live it and not exist in this holding pattern on the off-chance that there would come the day when Katniss might finally notice him. His resolution was to find a way to live without the hope of her.

There was also the bitter tang of betrayal in his mouth, a sour, acrid taste that lined his throat and threatened to gag him. He had to wonder what friendship was worth.

Finnick’s code was full of shit. There was no such thing as bros before hoes.

Life, _real_ life, was each man for himself, each man scrabbling and clawing and fighting to win whatever little piece of happiness he could for himself. That was the game every man played, and loyalty didn’t get you anywhere.

Through the door he could hear the countdown to midnight, loud voices yelling out of sync.

_10…9…8…_

He looked at his phone, considering sending a text to someone, _anyone_ , to wish them a Happy New Year. But he had no one that needed to hear from him.

_7...6...5…_

Dropping his phone back in his pocket, he backed up to the door, sliding down its length and landing on the floor, his knees tucked up to his chest.

_4...3...2..._

He was at a party surrounded by friends, and he had never felt lonelier in his life.

No one needed him. And there was no self-pity in the realization, not really. It was resignation. A hard truth best learned sooner rather than later.

He was on his own.

_1…_

_HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!_

Noisemakers pealed, the ebullient sound so cruelly at odds with the way he felt. He heard his friends wishing each other a Happy New Year and the drunken strains of Auld Lang Syne. The tune was horribly off-key, but no one seemed to notice or care.

He listened for her voice one last time before making himself forget her.

If she sang, he couldn’t hear her, and while that was probably for the best, the knowledge that he’d never hear Katniss Everdeen’s voice again was almost more than he could take.

Peeta didn’t know when it would be safe to exit the bathroom, at what point the kisses and well wishes would be over and done. He’d prefer to spend the remainder of the night in there, sitting on the cold slate floor, counting the sterile-looking subway tiles lining the walls, but he knew that eventually someone would need to use the bathroom.

A few minutes past midnight he heard a tentative knock at the door, as if the person on the other side wasn’t sure if this was a bathroom or a storage closet.

“I’ll be right out,” Peeta called, standing up and walking over to the sink to take one last look at himself— to make sure that whoever was standing on the other side waiting to use the bathroom couldn’t see how wrecked he felt. He didn’t want anyone other than Annie Cresta to know he’d hidden in the bathroom— or why.

He took a deep breath to steel his resolve and opened the door with a purposeful swing, not knowing what scene to expect on the other side and trying not to care. For all he knew, Gale would be making out with Katniss on the couch. He prepared himself for that, for the worst-case scenario.

Of all the people he might expect to see standing on the other side, _she_ wasn’t one of them.

“Hey,” Katniss said, her apprehensive gray eyes as wide as saucers, her fists clenched at her sides.

He knew the expression on his face matched hers. Like a starving man, his eyes soaked in the sight of her, supping every last ounce of nourishment he could to prepare him for the lifelong drought ahead.

“Hey.” He didn’t know why he was smiling or why his heart was hammering so violently in his chest if he could still remember the exact second he had felt it die.

“I… uh.” She bit the inside of her cheek and knocked one of her fists lightly against her thigh.

Peeta wanted to take her hand and kiss her wrist, that mysteriously tattooed wrist, and coax her to relax. What could really be so awful?

She was going to have the best life. Someone would give her that.

“You need to use the bathroom?” he supplied, stepping aside to let her pass.

“No.” She shook her head adamantly but said nothing else. She just stared at him with her unnerving gray eyes— those piercing eyes that were looking at him in a way he hadn’t seen before.

He looked over his shoulder into the empty bathroom, beginning to feel stupid and lightheaded for hoping that the reason she’d knocked on the door was to talk to him. There was no chance of that, none at all. She must have been looking for someone else.

“You were… uh… looking for someone?”

She nodded her head and swallowed thickly. “Yeah.”

Her hair had begun to fall from her braid, the soft, dark strands perfectly framing her delicate face. Peeta resisted the urge to reach out and touch one, to tuck it behind her ear so that he could know what Katniss’ hair felt like in his hands.

Exhaling heavily, she added, “You.”

Three minutes into the New Year, and Peeta had already broken his resolution. The second Katniss uttered that word— _you_ — he felt his chest cracking open and hope rushing back in.

“Me?” He could barely speak the word through the tightness in his throat. “Why?”

He hoped. Yes, he hoped. He waited and prayed and hoped, and what the fuck were resolutions for but to be broken and smashed and immediately forgotten?

Her voice was a whisper he couldn’t hear. He read her lips, her luscious, beautiful lips as they told him, “I forgot to wish you a Happy New Year.”

Then her lips, the lips he had dreamed about kissing a thousand times, were on his.

She didn’t kiss him like an old friend.

She didn’t kiss him like an acquaintance.

She kissed him like she needed him, like he was hers and she was his and that was all there was to it.

Peeta’s arms wound their way around her waist, pulling her body close to his, relishing the way they fit together. Katniss’ hands crawled upward, along his arms, his shoulders, his neck, until her fingers grasped the roots of his hair and pulled, pulled him down closer and deeper.

She pulled, and he pulled, and they pulled at each other until there was no space left between them and no time in which they hadn’t been exactly like this.

Her lips were soft and sweet, the taste of her even sweeter, and as their tongues touched and traced and tangled, Peeta groaned, his hand caressing the curve of her spine. Katniss Everdeen tasted like peanut butter and celery and beer— sweet and fresh and bitter all at once. There was no one else whose taste compared to that.

Worth the wait... she had been worth every minute and hour and year, and if Peeta had to wait another ten years to kiss her like this again, he would do it without a second thought.

They kissed until it seemed like there was no oxygen left in the room and their lungs would collapse from the strain.

She broke away, panting, her flushed face shining up at his. “Since when?”

He shot a quick look over her shoulder toward Annie, but if Annie had snitched she gave no indication of it. Finnick had taken up residence on the couch beside her, the two of them sitting next to each other in silence.

“Annie?” Peeta asked, searching Katniss’ face for the answer. Wanting to know, after all this time, how she knew. His thumb stroked her waist, drawing circles over and over across the fabric of her dress, desperate to touch the bare skin beneath.

She gave a small smile and shake of the head. “No. Gale.”

He was such an asshole for having doubted Gale’s friendship. He knew that. But he’d never been happier in his life to be an asshole. Peeta looked down at Katniss, a boyish grin on his face. He’d been wrong. So completely _fucking_ wrong. Because if hope and love and loyalty got you nowhere, then what was Katniss doing in his arms?

“Peeta,” she said, her hands framing his face, her soft skin on his stubble calling his thoughts back to her question. “Since when?”

He shrugged. Wasn’t it obvious? He didn’t need to think about his answer. He was surprised she had to ask. “Since forever.”

She gasped at the words like he’d just dropped a bucket of ice water over her head. Her hand fell to his chest, and she began to push him back.

She pushed him back but not away. Because as she pushed, she followed.

Back and back. Into the bathroom. And as they stepped into the room, she closed the door behind them.

And then she locked the door.

 


	3. Finnick Brodair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for such a long wait between updates- and that this chapter arrives after the holidays [womp womp]. I was hoping to update it for Christmas, but I've been facing some health stuff over the past couple months. In addition to this chapter, there will be an Everlark!epilogue, which is already written and will be posted this Friday (Jan. 20). With many thanks to my betas dandelion-sunset, eala-musings, everlylark, and jennagill for all their guidance, support, feedback, and friendship. Thank you, ladies! I love you. <33333 All remaining errors are mine. Sadly, The Hunger Games isn't. 
> 
> And thanks so much to you, for reading. If you've enjoyed the story so far, drop me a line. You can also find me on tumblr as papofglencoe. I'd love it if you stopped by and said hi. Definitely no need to be shy. 
> 
> For etherealfinnick, who asked me a year ago to drabble her a little Odesta for Christmas. Let's pretend this is what she asked for, shall we? <3

When in doubt, lie your way out.

It’s what he did every time he woke up still sprawled between a woman’s legs, his face buried in an unfamiliar bird’s nest of hair that smelled like some fruit or herb he had a better chance of guessing the name of than the chick he’d been balls deep in only hours earlier. Every morning he’d wake up like this he would lift his head and make eye contact with Random Score From the Night Before, and he’d smile and say he’d had an unforgettable night (he couldn’t even remember what positions they’d fucked in), that he couldn’t wait to see her again (maybe he’d introduce her to the dog he didn’t own), and that he’d definitely absolutely, without a doubt call her later (he’d already blocked her number in the Uber over to her place).

Then Finnick would grab his pants from wherever he’d ditched them on his way into her bed, hastily throwing them on one leg at a time, his toes anxiously tunneling their way down the fabric, his fingers moving at lightning speed to zip up his fly, and, as he pulled his shirt back down over his head he’d flash Random Score a winning smile and tell her she was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen.

But the truth was, nine times out of ten, Random Score wasn’t even the most beautiful creature in a room that had just the two of them in it.

It’s how he got out, by lying.

Look, there was no sense dragging out relationships that weren’t going to go anywhere—not with the past being what it was, and with all the secrets and lies he had to tell piling up like they always did. But there was no sense leaving a girl feeling any worse about that than he had to. He’d bend them over, make them come, and, in the seconds before he ran away from them, he made them smile too. All with lies.

_God bless us, everyone_.

And even with the people he still allowed himself to love, he lied. He put on a show—provided them with a never-ending supply of cocky smiles and smartass remarks, pretended he felt as confident and content as he knew he looked because the truth? Was ugly. And no one, least of all himself, wanted to face the truth more than they had to.

So when the front door opened and one of his best friends, who had bloated and swelled to the size of a Santa Claus float in the Macy’s Day Parade, greeted him with a squeal, he lied, smiling and wrapping his arms as far as he could around Delly’s massive mid-section—was she birthing a Thom-sized baby, with his beer belly and all?—and told her, sweetly, like it was a compliment, because he loved her without reservation, “You’re glowing, Del.”

Cutting through the bullshit, lots of things glowed, okay? The thousands of strobing Christmas lights stapled to the aluminum siding and rotting shingles of Thom and Delly’s house were glowing. Rudolph’s plastic nose, flashing a lurid red on the front lawn from its place at the front of Santa’s sleigh, was glowing. Hell, the one time he’d gotten the clap, his dick had glowed.

But Delly? Looked pregnant as fuck. And tired, like she was already halfway through the eighteen-year marathon of insomnia she had willingly, stupidly signed up for when she allowed Thom, the human embodiment of a Berenstain Bear, to deposit his honey in her pot.

With the deeply unsettling image of procreating furries flashing like a Boomerang-style video in his brain, Finnick headed down to the basement to get a drink (or ten) and to commence Operation Hit and Quit It, otherwise known as The Night Finnick Odair Fucked The Pain of The Year Away On Behalf of the Human Race.

Frank Sinatra was playing as he loped down the stairs, a sad, boozy rendition of “I’ll Be Home For Christmas,” that had him pining for the end of the night, when he could plant a thousand sloppy, drunken kisses on the soft, moist lips of...

His eyes swept the crowded room, looking for the perfect candidate.

Clove Kurpinski was wielding some sharp object by the hors d'oeuvres table, and because he was rather fond of his nipples and preferred to keep them attached to his chest, he kept looking, glancing over to the ratty couch against the wall where Cashmere and Gloss, who he was pretty sure were cousins or some sick shit like that, were tonguing each other’s faces. There was a clump of women in the middle of the room he’d never seen before—a sea of plain faces and frizzy hair, by the looks of it, nondescript women who were cloistered around each other wearing shapeless dresses and the opposite of Fuck Me Heels—Take Me Home to Meet Your Mom and Dad flats.

Unfortunately for the nuns in the middle of the room, his parents had retired to Guam, and the only home he’d gone to for Christmas had been in a blonde waitress’ skirt after she had served him mashed potatoes and gravy with her bare fingers.

The chicks in the cloister were a _hard pass_.

He veered over to the beer pong table, where his old buddies had congregated, and, slapping five with Thresh, who already looked like a DUI waiting to happen, he jumped immediately into a new game.

“Hey, man, good to see you!” Thresh thundered at him over the din.

“Good to see you too,” Finnick grinned, taking a non-regulation swig of beer from one of the Solo cups on the table, swishing it around like mouthwash before swallowing the room-temperature swill with a hiss. The truth. It was always better when he could start with that. It was so rare that he could.

“How you been?” his friend asked, taking aim at the triangle of cups in front of Finnick and throwing the ping pong ball in a smooth arc.

It landed with a satisfying plop in the amber fluid of one of the cups in front of him, so Finn fished it out with his fingers and downed the beer. “Pretty good,” he lied, steering the conversation away from himself. “So tell me, man. Now that you’re living with Rue, how bad has she been busting your balls?”

“Hey!” Rue called out from a huddle of friends a few feet away, smiling at Finnick despite her tone. “I can _hear_ you, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah. You hear everything. But there ain’t shit you can say about it, because you know it’s true.” Finnick chuckled and turned back to Thresh, deftly bouncing the ball off the table and watching it ricochet and land in a cup. “But seriously,” he asked his friend, “are you still allowed to take a piss standing up?”

“You joke,” Thresh laughed, “but I’ll tell you—” He shot a look over at Rue, who’d begun chatting with the Leeg sisters, and lowered his voice. “The sex is… _daily_ , man. Twice a day, _three_ times. I don’t know… she’s breaking me. I don’t think she’s gonna be happy until we have sex on every single surface of that apartment.” He grinned broadly, his teeth a stark white against the dark tone of his skin. “So you’re not gonna hear me complain about putting down the toilet seat or rinsing off a few dishes.”

“Well, enjoy it while you can, inside cat,” Finnick said, watching the ball as Thresh bounced it off the table and it missed its target, skittering across the basement floor. “Because when you get married, you know all that shit goes on lockdown.”

“Man, what do you know about that?” Thresh laughed, but the sound died with a groan as he realized what he’d said—or, rather, who he’d said it to. “Fuck, you know I didn’t mean it like that, Finn.” He pawed at his mouth in mortification, his palm pressing uselessly against it as though the words were still milling there and could somehow be pushed back in.

“Naw, it’s alright,” Finnick lied, landing another toss and desperately thinking about how he needed a drink a little stiffer than whatever pisswater Thom had homebrewed, and company a little more female and anonymous—and therefore more likely to ride his dick than pity him.

He played the game, flashing a cocky smile at the crowd that was gathering around them to watch him trounce Thresh. As he sank the white ball in the last of the cups in front of his opponent, he held his arms out and bellowed, “Are you not entertained?” in his best Maximus impression, playing the part, as always, while his friends laughed and applauded his victory.

Eager to forfeit, he held up a ping pong ball to the crowd. “Any volunteers to take my place?” he challenged, his voice laden with the implication that he found everyone else around him to be an assortment of the weakest, most insufferable pussies—a surefire way to get someone to take over without questioning his supremacy as Beer Pong God.

Never one to back down from a fight, Jackson hip-checked him out of the way. “Lemme at him, Odair,” she said, prising the ball from his hands.

Glad to be out of the spotlight, he looked around the gathered crowd until he spotted the one person least likely to ask him questions that he didn’t want to answer truthfully.

“Katniss,” he said, stooping down to hug the girl in front of him. She looked good, he had to admit. She’d been cute enough in high school, but he’d never really understood why Peeta had a permanent hard-on for her until recently. Something had changed over the last several years, though, that made her seem warmer and more approachable. Maybe it was the clusterfuck of a relationship she’d had with Darius that had softened her opinion toward the rest of the douchebags in the world. She still didn’t smile much, which was a shame, because when she did she honest-to-fuck glowed—and not in a pregnant lady or rash-covered dick kind of way—but, if she didn’t smile much, at least she scowled a whole lot less, and that improved her looks.

_Ineligible receiver on the field_ , he reminded himself, keeping his hands a football field’s distance away from her. If anyone was making a pass at her tonight, it was Peeta, unlikely as that was.

“Finnick. Good seeing you,” she said, having the grace not to ask him how he was (one miserable asshole can always spot another).

“Yeah, definitely.” He took a sip of beer from his Solo cup, not because he was thirsty, but because that’s what people did at parties to distract themselves from the awkwardness of who they’d become around the people who knew who they used to be. “How long’s it been, anyway?”

“The Fourth of July, I think. You came to the thing at our—uh... _my_ —place.

“Yeah, yeah. That’s right.” Finnick bit back a smirk as he remembered the ill-fated party. “So… _that_ was a night to remember, huh?”

“Sorry.” Katniss grimaced and took a sip of beer from her cup, obviously considering her next words. “About that…”

“No, it’s fine,” he laughed, meaning it. He’d enjoyed the reminder of why it was better to be alone… or at least he’d needed it. Holidays were always harder than the rest for him. “Sometimes the fireworks are up in the sky, and other times they’re out on the balcony when two people decide they want to firebomb each other’s faces.”

“It was a bad one,” she said, so quietly he almost couldn’t hear her over the laughter of their friends and the June Christie playing in the background.

He’d overheard enough of the fight to know it had been a bad one—although he still couldn’t imagine Dorkus scoring with another chick behind a girl like Katniss’ back. Regardless of the fact that all relationships were doomed to spontaneously combust, Dorkus should have known better. He’d been batting way out of his league with Everdeen in the first place.

“Yeah. Well, it’s all over and done now, right?” he said, scanning the room until he found Peeta, who was trapped in a conversation with Cato Taylor. Why he’d care about his buddy’s prospects with this girl was beyond him, since shit never lasted anyway, but Peeta had been in a holding pattern for years over her, so he might as well do what he could to nudge the poor fucker along.

When Katniss nodded and took another drink, he pressed on. “And now that you’re free of all... _that_ … you should have another thing at your place. Celebrate your independence again. Proper, this time.”

Her eyebrows pinched together. “Yeah? You think people would want to come?”

“Sure,” he shrugged, muttering into his cup as he raised it to his mouth for a drink, “Some more than others.”

“What was that?” she yelled over the din, leaning forward to hear him better.

“I said ‘Sure. You should have another,’” he shouted back.

“Maybe I will.” Katniss nodded and bit her lip, holding back one of her blinding smiles, like she thought showing her teeth was a crime against humanity. The girl had some major self-esteem problems. Peet would have his work cut out for him with this one, if he ever got his shit together.

“So you came here with Gale and Peeta again this year?” she asked.

_Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t say it_...

When he didn’t immediately answer, she added, “None of you brought… anyone?”

_Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t say it_...

He knew how long it had been. How many years. He didn’t need Katniss Everdeen, or anyone else, reminding him that he was alone.

Katniss glanced over her shoulder, her eyes landing on Peeta where he stood across the room. Peeta looked over at them like he could sense her eyes on him, and Katniss whipped her head back around, a telltale flush spreading onto her face. _Well, slap my ass and call me Susan_. He’d never noticed it before, but Katniss Everdeen was almost _comically_ into Peeta Mellark. Finn knew she liked him—everybody _liked_ him—but here she was, fishing for information on him from the person who had a reputation (falsely, but what did they know?) for running his mouth.

Relieved that she was asking about his buddy flying stag and not him, Finnick played it cool, like he didn’t see right through her, and jutted his chin toward the bar where Gale was seated, talking heatedly to some chick with a half-shaved head. “I think he was hoping to see Madge.”

“Ah,” she grimaced. “You wouldn’t have heard yet either… but he’s gonna need you, I think.”

Finnick frowned down at her, shaking his head, hating how his heart immediately started pounding in his chest, reminding him it was still there, still alive, still sentient. “What happened? She alright?”

“Yeah…” Katniss reached out and absentmindedly touched Finnick’s arm, instantly thinking, like everyone always did, of _her_. “Nothing… like that,” she said. “It’s just that Madge and Bristel… they’re expecting.”

Finnick took a sharp breath, the air hissing through his front teeth. _What was in the fucking water in this town anyway?_ “So she’s really doing it, sticking with Collier?”

“Seems like it.”

“Christ.” He shook his empty cup, watching the dregs of his beer swirl around the bottom. “What’s with everyone popping ‘em out?”

Katniss shrugged, wrapping one arm around her waist and crossing the other against her chest. “That’s just what people do, I guess. They grow up, get older, and… move on with life. I mean... what else is there, really?”

He didn’t have an answer to that—the meaning of life. So far as he could tell, there wasn’t one.

“You ever see yourself having any?” Finnick looked pointedly toward Delly, who was standing behind the bar with Thom. Her husband had wrapped his arms around her shoulders and was nuzzling his face into the crook of her neck, saying something with a smile. Now _that_ was the crime against humanity—being so willfully, naively in love with someone else that you put your entire happiness in their hands.

It wouldn’t end well, in the long run. It couldn’t.

“Eh, I don’t know,” she hedged, looking discomfited. Her eyes inadvertently made their way back over to Peeta. “Maybe down the line, if the right guy came along.” She smiled ruefully up at Finnick. “But I don’t see that in the stars for me, to be honest.”

They stood in silence for a moment, feeling like two futureless orphans, but because Finnick could read every last letter written on the wall for Katniss, one that included everything she’d never allowed herself to want with one of his best friends, he cleared his throat and decided he had to walk away.

“Well,” he said, in what he knew to be the penultimate conversation ender, “we don’t always see what’s on the road ahead of us.”

She looked stricken by his words, and he knew she didn’t deserve that—but then people didn’t always get what they deserved.

He didn’t wait for her to land on her feet again before he bailed. “I’m—ah—gonna get something a little stronger. I’ll catch up with you later, alright?” Finnick held up his empty cup and nodded in parting to Katniss before sauntering over to the bar.

Johanna Mason was already seated there, doing shots of whiskey out of a dusty souvenir glass that said “Cape Canaveral” in a corny retro script. She smiled at Finnick, or what passed as one of her smiles—anyone else might call it a sneer—as he joined her.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” she smirked, holding the glass up to him and waggling it. The nose of the 60s-era rocket painted on it yawed wildly back and forth, back and forth, while the liquid inside the glass rolled from side to side. “A phallus on a shot glass for all the guys with whiskey dicks.” She laughed and chugged the shot, grimacing as the liquid seared its way to her stomach. “That’s some good shit,” she hacked, sliding the empty glass across the bartop to Finnick and nudging the bottle toward him with her index finger.

He poured himself a shot and downed it, and then poured himself a second. Mason was his tempo—she understood better than everyone else that if you kept the wisecracks coming, no one would notice—or care—how damaged you were.

“Hey, what’s the deal with those two?” He shot a look to where Cashmere and Gloss had moved, now rutting and grinding their bodies together against one of the walls on the other side of the room. Peeta had moved over to the couch where they’d been earlier and was talking to some person he couldn’t see through the crowd—some drip like David Marvel, probably—that he wouldn’t really have to listen to so that he could watch as Katniss helped herself to the snacks at the hors d’oeuvres table. “Aren’t they, like, cousins?”

Mason cackled, throwing her head back in glee. She rolled her head to the side, her wicked eyes glittering at him. “ _Better_. Brother and sister.”

He spit out his mouthful of whiskey, watching it fall in a thick mist onto the glasses behind the bar, where the droplets reflected the Christmas lights strung up across the ceiling. “You have _got_ to be shitting me.” There wasn’t much that shocked him, but leave it to Johanna to find a way.

“Okay, not really. Not anymore, at least. But their parents were married for a year or something, back in high school. Remember?” She ran a finger over the damp bar top, smearing a bead of water over one of the pennies that had been epoxied onto the surface, pressing so hard it was like she was trying to blot out Honest Abe’s ugly face.

“Oh yeah,” he mused, remembering the time Gloss had conscripted the rest of the swim team into egging his own house, one of the many pranks the team had played on its athletes. “We vandalized Gloss’ house one time—and I guess Cashmere’s too. I remember him launching an egg over his head and yelling, ‘Take that, you motherfucker!’” Finnick laughed and shook his head, pouring Johanna a shot and taking a swig for himself directly from the bottle. “Guess he meant that literally. Hey… think the perv liked to watch his step-sister prance around the house in a towel?”

“What do _you_ think?”

They both shot a look over to Cashmere and Gloss and laughed at the thought, then steered the conversation to other equally safe topics—movies they’d seen recently, concerts they’d gone to, friends they could affectionately drag. After a couple more shots, Mason’s hand made its way to his forearm. “So tell me,” she said in a comically husky voice, one that reminded him of Kathleen Turner after a couple packs of cigarettes and a hard night on the town, “Are we finally going to resolve this crackling sexual tension between us?”

Finnick laughed, a full-bodied, already drunken laugh, and Johanna grinned wolfishly back at him, neither one of them tempted in the slightest. In many ways, there would be no easier, better choice than for him to sleep with Johanna Mason. She didn’t pity him, and she knew he wasn’t going to fall in love with her.

If only his dick could get the memo.

“Why not.” He jerked his head in the direction of the former step-siblings. “Since screwing your family is back in style and all.”

“Well, Finn, when you put it so romantically—” She slid off the barstool a little unsteadily and patted his arm. “I’ve got another brother I have to hit on.”

“Won’t be happy till you creep us all out, huh?”

“Nope. And also... those two lovebirds—” she pointed across the room, to where Peeta and Katniss had begun, shockingly, talking to each other, “are making me really fucking uncomfortable.”

Finnick smirked and took another chug of the caramel-colored liquor, well on his way to a whiskey dick situation—not that it mattered. “Lemme guess… because they have feelings?”

“Exactly… the freaks,” she laughed, weaving her way through the room to wreak whatever havoc she had in mind for them.

Drunk enough now to make beer pong slightly more competitive, Finnick moseyed back over to the table to take on Brutus. And so the night dragged on much the same way—one drink after another, one game after another, one meaningless conversation filled with inane banter and stupid jokes or, worse, the lies. So many lies. _Life was great. Work was great. He couldn’t complain_. All lies.

He wondered if it was this way for everyone—if the people you once felt like you could be entirely yourself around inevitably became the ones you hid the most from, behind the mask of the person they still wanted you to be. Maybe the past was a prison for everyone, more or less, and not just for him.

The more he drank, the higher the truth floated to the surface. It became almost impossible to submerge. The truth was that he was miserable and lonely, and he was always going to be miserable and lonely. And that he deserved to be. He deserved to live and die, miserable and alone. And he deserved to feel every second of it, to lie on the ground in a million shattered pieces, bleeding out.

He’d ruined her life. With one text, one bullshit message that said nothing at all: _I dunno. We could keep it? Or not. It’s up to you_.

Over time, he’d come to accept that there was nothing he could have said to her that would have made it worth wrapping the front end of her car around a tree. The truth about it—the only one there was, the one he could never run from—was that he shouldn’t have said anything at all. He should have left her alone, like she’d asked him to. He should have given her the space, like she wanted, to worry and panic and freak the fuck out on her own.

The sound of midnight erupting all around him jarred him from his thoughts, the noisemakers and the laughter and the kissing and his friends singing some bastardized, drunken version of Auld Lang Syne, the only lyrics they could get right haunting him. _Taunting_ him.

Like he could ever forget her, or want to.

He didn’t know where to go—he only knew he had go somewhere—so he shambled through the basement, heading toward the ancient couch along the back wall, hoping he could pass out in it and wake up tomorrow—or was it already today?—and somehow the only thing that would hurt would be his head. Collapsing next to some person—a woman, although he didn’t bother to look at her—he rested his elbows on his knees for a second and took a steadying breath, sliding the mask back on as best as he could manage.

“Well, that’s that. Odair strikes out,” he declared with false bravado, mostly to himself, but also to her, still not looking—or caring—who he’d said it to.

“It’s kinda early to be calling it a night, don’t you think?” she replied, and when he heard that her voice was airy and lilting, he looked to see if the woman it belonged to was half as beautiful.

Her brown hair fell in waves as soft as the ripples of a tropical lagoon, her eyes reflecting the color of the shallows back to him. Her cheeks were flushed pink, most likely from the wine she’d been drinking—her lips and teeth were stained red, and she clutched a stemmed glass between her fingers, the blood-red liquid threatening to spill onto her white dress every time she took a breath. She looked as innocent and virginal and wide-eyed as a bride on her wedding day, watching her husband take off his pants in front of her for the first time, downing half a bottle of wine beforehand to help ease the pinch.

_For fuck’s sake_.

She wasn’t only looking at him with those Bambi-like eyes of hers, like she’d marked him as the future father of her children (he sure as fuck wasn’t), but she was also wearing Take Me Home to Meet Your Mom and Dad flats too. And he bet that under her dress, under a practical and otherwise unremarkable bra, she’d have ‘Marry Me’ scrawled in black sharpie across her perfect, perky little tits.

He tore his eyes away from her and stared straight ahead, looking anywhere but at the woman whose body had shifted toward his from the sagging of the worn out cushions. He was contemplating getting up to wait at the bathroom door, planning to hide inside for a few minutes to escape the girl next door who was now encroaching on his personal space, when he saw Katniss approach the bathroom and knock. She anxiously tapped her fist against her thigh, taking long, deep breaths like she was staving off a fit of panic, while she waited for the person who was inside the bathroom to come out.

And then Peeta opened the door.

Finnick watched it all unfold, the beginning of the rest of his best friend’s life, from his own special front-row seat in hell. He watched the hope dawning on Peeta’s face and the almost stupidly imbecilic smile he gave Katniss when she said something—Finnick wasn’t sure what, but it was fairly obvious that she’d gone looking for him, so he could only imagine it had something to do with the fact that she wanted to bone him at least half as badly as he wanted to bone her. And he saw their kiss—their kisses—how the two of them wrapped around each other without a second thought, a tangled mess of hands mindlessly, needfully exploring each other’s bodies, oblivious to the world around them.

Katniss pushed Peeta into the bathroom, the bastard grinning the entire way, and the door swung shut behind them with a bang.

“Fuck, I’m horny,” Finnick grumbled, adjusting his semi over his pants and hoping the girl next to him would be so shocked she’d scuttle back to whatever Disneyland attraction she’d stumbled out of in the first place.

Instead she laughed, and for the second time that night, he felt compelled to look at her and really _see_ who was sitting next to him.

“Bet you anything we’ll be seeing each other next year, too.” She gave a knowing smile and patted the narrow sliver of couch cushion between their thighs. “Except instead of sitting here, we’ll be in some uncomfortable hall chairs, sipping well drinks at Katniss and Peeta’s reception.”

“No.” He shook his head resolutely, the world continuing to rotate back and forth long after his head stopped moving. “Peeta would never do that. Not my bro. He hasn’t even _tapped_ that, and you’ve already got him married off? _Fuck_.” He squirmed on his ass and tugged at his pant legs, unaccountably agitated. “Guys don’t think like that, Princess. And besides... what asshole gets married on New Year’s?”

“One that’s been waiting for years to _tap that_.”

Finn narrowed his eyes, his brain slowly metabolizing the facts about herself this girl had revealed. Not only did she know Katniss and Peeta, but she knew Mellark had been carrying the torch for Everdeen since the dawn of the Olympic Games. As he scrutinized her, the girl’s brilliant green eyes sparkled playfully, like she knew some secret he didn’t. She took several greedy gulps of her wine and then leaned back, the liquid sloshing over the rim and onto her hand and dress.

He reached over and took the glass from her, telling himself it was only because he wanted some for himself. He took a drink, for appearance’s sake, and looked at the girl a little closer. Her skin was so flawless it looked like she’d been locked in an attic half her life, like she was whatever the fuck Gremlins were before water touched them and shit got all crazy. She also possibly looked Amish.

“So if you know Mellark _and_ Everdeen,” he said, “I must know you from somewhere too, right?”

She flushed the Crayola crayon color “Clap-Dick Red” at the question. “Eh,” she hedged, “probably not.”

He frowned, trying harder to place her. “But you look vaguely familiar.”

“Do I?” She shifted uncomfortably, the couch cushion sinking beneath her so that their shoulders now touched. “Um… I’m here every year, so maybe that’s it.” She waved her hand as if to say _no bother_ and then offered it to him in greeting. “I’m Annie, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you, Amy,” he said, taking her hand. “I’m Finnick.”

She crossed her legs toward him and smiled despite the fact he’d fucked up her name. “And how are you doing tonight, Finnick?”

“Great,” he lied. “You?”

“A little better now.” She looked down at where their hands, still intertwined, had fallen onto her thigh.

He should panic at the realization that he was holding _Little Miss Marry Me Please’s_ hand, but instead he calmly unlinked their hands and moved his higher on her thigh, offering her something other than what a girl like her wanted, testing out the waters to see if it maybe it could be enough.

In response, she uncrossed her legs and reached out, grabbing the glass from his free hand and downing what was left in it with one swig. Then she gingerly placed it on the floor, leaned in, and whispered in the shell of his ear—yelled, actually, but her voice was so soft it floated toward him like a secret shared in bed. “Did you want to get out of here?”

It didn’t get much more anonymous than that.

He cupped her chin, turning his face to hers, the tips of their noses the fraction of an inch apart. “Fuck yes,” he said, his lips mirroring the grin that had spread onto hers.

Wordlessly, she stood up— _bounded_ up, which almost made her fall on her ass—and she reached out for his hand, tugging him behind her as she led the way to the stairs.

“Where are we going?” he called after her, staring at her ass as she ascended the steps in front of him. Through the fabric of her white dress he could see she was wearing a pale pink thong, and his cock swelled, whiskey be damned, as he thought about the pale pink pussy beneath the fabric of it, and how he wanted nothing more than to cover it with kisses and plunge his tongue between her pale pink lips.

“I—uh—thought we’d go back to my hotel,” she called back over her shoulder. “If that’s okay with you.”

It wasn’t okay. It was _perfect_. After tonight he didn’t have to lie and act like he intended to see her again. She’d go back to… wherever it was she lived. Hopefully somewhere thousands of miles away. And he’d go back to almost living.

When they reached the top of the stairs, Delly intercepted them on her way back down, using the top of her belly to balance a platter of crudites.

“Where are you two off to?” she asked in alarm, her eyebrows skyrocketing as she looked between Bambi and Finnick, who had wrapped his arm around his date-for-the-night’s waist.

“Amy and I were thinking we’d—ah—call it a night.”

“Is that right?” Delly bit her lip, and if Finnick were less drunk he’d swear she looked concerned. “And you and _Annie_ are calling it a night… together?”

“Yeah, that’s the plan...” The girl— _Annie_ —smiled, glancing up at Finnick with a light blush on her cheeks before turning back to their hostess. “Thanks so much for having everyone over again this year, Del. It was a great party.”

“Yeah, great,” Finnick lied, nodding.

“Alright, then.” Delly sighed in resignation and shot Finnick a wary look. “But you two _be good_.”

As if good had anything to do with what they were going to be.

“Okay, Mom,” Finn laughed, giving Delly an awkward half-hug so he wouldn’t crush the veggie platter she was holding, and he promised to text her later in the week to catch up. (The truth).

As they walked through the living room, he saw Hawthorne camped out on the couch, his feet up on the coffee table like he owned the place, an arm draped casually across the back of the sofa, watching a movie—some Western with Jamie Foxx that Finnick couldn’t remember the name of—on TV. None of that would be noteworthy, except the chick with the half-shaved head was sitting next to him, and Gale’s fingers were toying absentmindedly with one of the million piercings she had in her ear as they bickered about whatever they were watching.

“...What I’m telling you is that I think this was Tarantino’s first film as a mature director,” Gale huffed in annoyance.

The girl next to him laughed carelessly, completely unphased. “And I’m saying that, by every objective measure, that honor would have to go to Inglourious Basterds, not Django, even if Django was the more consistent film overall...”

“The fuck’s happening in there?” Finnick whispered to Annie once they reached the foyer.

The tiny brunette opened the coat closet and began sifting through the ocean of coats that had been jammed inside. “I don’t know,” she laughed, “but whatever it is, I give it about a week.”

He looked back at his buddy just in time to see him grip the girl’s face and kiss her— _hard_ —effectively shutting her up. The girl nipped him, and Gale pulled back with a grunt, but instead of clawing each other’s eyes out like Finnick half-expected, she climbed into his lap, straddling him, and began kissing him again, the flickering light of the television glinting off the metal of her tongue piercing as she ran it along Gale’s jawline.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, rummaging through the large fishbowl of keys on the hall table next to the front door.

“What are you doing?”

He looked up at Annie, his hand frozen around some strange set of keys, surprised by the disdain he heard in her voice, until, through the fog, he _remembered_.

“You’re not seriously thinking about driving right now.”

_No. Of course not_. He dropped the keys, pulling his hand out of the bowl, and mentally kicked the shit out of himself for thinking—or not thinking—about what he was doing. He should know better. He knew better. He _did_.

“That’s what they invented Uber for, dummy.” Annie waved her phone in front of his face, the car icon on the screen slowly winding its way down the road toward Thom and Delly’s house. She glanced at the screen and added, “Haymitch will be here in two minutes. C’mon.”

He followed her out onto the sidewalk, lifting his collar to shield his face from the wind and from her. He was a dumbass. And an asshole. And maybe she deserved to know that.

“Look,” he said, sighing and kicking at a chunk of snow that had collapsed from one of the tall drifts lining the driveway. “I don’t know what you’re expecting, but I’m—ah—not the guy who does relationships.”

“I know,” she said, the whites of her eyes reflecting the flashing lights on the house.

“Do you, though? Or do you think you’re the one who’s gonna somehow change that?”

She shrugged, and looked down the street as a pair of headlights slowly crawled toward them.

“I wonder if that’s Haymitch,” she murmured under her breath.

Finnick grabbed her arm gently, but firmly, urging her to look back up at him. For once he was going to do the right thing and tell the truth. “Listen to me, Annie. We can go out for some late-night grub and call it a day, go our separate ways and never see each other again. Or we can go back to your hotel… and then after, never see each other again. And those are the only two options I’m interested in.”

At least the truth came out right, even if it was ugly.

“Okay,” she shrugged, heading toward the gray sedan that had pulled up in front of the house, her feet crunching on the thin sheet of ice covering the cement as she walked. “Is this a Chevy Cruze, do you think?”

The driver’s side window rolled down, and a paunchy, grizzled, middle-aged man who looked like he was living on borrowed time leaned over the console. “You Annie, sweetheart?” he asked gruffly.

Annie smiled and nodded, opening the back door and sliding in. Finnick stayed rooted to the spot, waiting for her to make the call.

She looked at him, her pale skin glowing blue, then red, then blue, red, green. She reminded him of Christmas, of Easter, of the Fourth of July—of all the holidays, wrapped up into one package.

“Are you coming or what?”

It was all the invitation he needed. He shuffled carefully over the ice and climbed into the car, his hips nudging her to the side to make enough room for his asscheeks, but she stayed so close the pale skin of her thighs pressed against his, her flesh dotted with goosebumps. He put a hand on her thigh, stroking the skin with his thumb, trying to warm her up.

“You still headed to 876 Schechter?” the driver asked from the front, checking his GPS.

“Yes... the Hampton Inn,” Annie exhaled, resting her hand on Finnick’s thigh and her head on his shoulder, her fingers lightly tracing the inseam of his pants.

The drive was short, no more than ten minutes, and Finnick spent it devising the things he wanted to do to her—first, he was going to peel that pink thong off of her and eat her out while she was wearing that innocent white dress, watching her writhe and squirm on the tacky hotel comforter. Then he was gonna slide the top of the dress down to her waist so he could watch her perky tits bounce as he fucked her. These things, he considered, were non-optional.

What happened next would be up to her, but he hoped it involved her sweet mouth wrapped around his dick, his hands wound tightly into her kinky brown hair, as she took him in as deeply as she could, so deep he’d be able to feel the head of his cock nudging the back of her throat. He wanted to see what her green eyes looked like when she took him as far as she could, whether their color would grow deeper too, like the ocean, the farther he sank inside of her.

By the time they pulled up to the hotel he was achingly hard for her, his mouth wet at the thought of what she’d taste like, but if she noticed the tent he’d pitched in his pants she acted none the wiser about it as they strolled in the front door together and through the lobby.

“Happy New Year, Cinna,” she said to the person working reception, a sallow-faced boy dressed all in black, with a dash of gold eyeliner around his tragic—or perhaps just tired—eyes.

“Happy New Year to you too, Annie.”

Finnick followed her as she veered to the right, toward the elevator, and punched the “down” button with her thumb.

He scratched his head, wondering how the worker knew her name and pondering whether he was too drunk to piece together what was probably a very obvious explanation. “You been staying here a while or something?”

“Or something,” Annie laughed, stepping onto the elevator and pressing the button for the basement level.

Finnick pointed to the panel where the plastic square next to the “B” was illuminated and teased, “Aw, that’s too bad. You’re missing out on a stunning view of Mohegan Sun Arena.”

She bit back a smile. “I’ll have to remember that.”

He narrowed his eyes, trying to make sense of the girl—the way she was vaguely familiar to him, how she knew his friends and seemed to know him too. “Where _do_ you live now anyway?”

She shrugged. “I thought you never wanted to speak to me again after tonight. So what does it matter?”

“It doesn’t. I—” He didn’t know why he’d asked. It had been stupid and misleading of him. “Forget it.”

When the elevator reached the basement, she stepped off, turning sharply to the right and then, after twenty or so feet, turning again down a short hallway instead of continuing straight to the rooms on that floor. She stopped in front of a long glass-plate window, a series of panes that stretched from floor-to-ceiling and spanned perhaps ten or fifteen feet in length. In the middle of the window was a door, and a placard next to it that read “Pool.”

“I—uh—think it’s gonna be locked for the night, Princess,” Finnick said, shifting on his feet, wondering why the fuck they weren’t in her room already, getting naked.

“Yeah, that’s why I’ve got these.” She pulled a set of keys out of her coat pocket and flipped through them until she spotted the one she was looking for, putting it with ease into the lock on the pool door.

“They give those out to guests?”

“No,” she snickered quietly. “I work here.”

“Wait. So you _do_ live in town?”

“Yeah. Have my whole life.” She stepped through the door into the dim pool room, turning around and holding up her index finger to her lips, shushing him. He followed her, and she locked the door quickly behind them, pulling the curtains on each side of the window shut.

The pool wasn’t large or particularly deep—the black squares stenciled around the perimeter indicated that the deep end was only five feet. There’d be no diving into that. But it had been months since he’d been swimming, and the sight of the warm water lapping at the edges of the pool reminded him of a homecoming.

“I fucking love swimming. I used to be captain of the swim team back in high school.” He walked into the humid room and took off his coat, draping it over the back of a plastic pool chair.

“Yeah,” she said, taking off her coat too and sitting down on a chaise lounge, slipping off one, then both, of her flats. “I know.”

They looked at each other for a couple moments in silence, Annie sitting on the chair, Finnick standing several feet away, each of them breathing in the heavy, humid air.

“Want to go for a swim?” she finally asked.

“We don’t have bathing suits,” he grinned slyly, by way of an answer.

She shrugged, her hair cascading over one of her slender shoulders. “I don’t mind if you see me naked.”

“Well, I was kind of counting on that,” he laughed, walking over to her and offering his hand to pull her up.

She tugged at one of the sleeves of his button-up shirt. “You go first.”

Finnick took a step back from her so that she could watch him undress. There wasn’t much he could give to them—any of them—but his body was something he could share, at least. He unbuttoned his shirt with nimble fingers, and slid it off, one arm at a time. Annie reached a hand out for it, taking the discarded shirt from him and clutching it to her chest.

His undershirt came next, then his belt and pants, and Annie took those from him too, holding them in a messy, crumpled ball. Peeling off his socks, which he tossed onto his shoes, he stood in front of her in his boxers, the muscles of his stomach clenching in anticipation.

“I think it’s your turn now.”

Annie nodded and placed Finnick’s clothes on a nearby table. With her back still turned to him, she reached down and lifted her dress over her head, adding it to their pile of clothes.

In the dim light of the room, her pale skin glowed like moonlight in a starry summer sky. Her long hair hung halfway to her ass, drawing his attention to the small of her back, the way it sloped gently inward, begging for his arms to wrap themselves around her. And then there was her ass, each rounded curve asking to be gripped, nipped, slapped.

He thought he was mesmerized until she turned around and faced him. The bra she was wearing didn’t leave much to the imagination—it was a skimpy, lacy thing, the same pale pink color as her thong. Through the lace he could see her dusky nipples—small, tight buds he wanted to torture and worship in turn. And although he knew some guys might say there wasn’t much to her, he’d argue she had absolutely everything a woman needed, and more.

“You’re the most beautiful creature I have ever seen,” he told her, and it wasn’t a lie.

She smiled shyly and reached behind her, unhooking her bra, and because he was nothing if not fair, he dropped his boxers and kicked them off one foot at a time, gathering them in his fist and walking toward her, his erection leading the way. When he was within reach of her, he pulled her bra away from where she was clutching it to her chest, exposing her perfect tits.

He wanted to kiss her so fucking badly, to claim her and cover her and make her moan his name, but something about that didn’t seem right. The truth was, she was too good for him, and for any of that with him.

She probably saw it too, because she exhaled a shaky breath and took a step back, pushing her hand against his bare chest to keep space between them.

“Let’s take a swim,” she said, turning and walking to the pool, still wearing her thong.

Sitting at the edge, she lowered herself in and then turned around to face him, her hair fanning out across the surface of the water. He cannonballed in after her, wanting to feel the water and, specifically, the weightlessness of their bodies entwined together in it.

But by the time he resurfaced for air she had already started swimming laps, and so he joined her, pacing her, relishing the feel of his heart speeding up in his chest. She started with the butterfly stroke, and when she switched to the backstroke, he did too. After several laps she started swimming the breaststroke, powerfully cutting through the water. Finnick froze in place, treading water, a sickening, dawning recognition washing over him as he watched her swim and switch over to the sidestroke.

When she noticed he was no longer swimming beside her, she swam up to him, looking a little abashed.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes,” he lied.

She shook her head and uselessly wiped water from her face with wet hands. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” He looked at her as hard as she was looking at him, searching for answers the other didn’t want to give.

“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it… that you’re okay.” Her hands fell to his shoulders, her green eyes as warm as the water around them, as welcoming and gentle. The warmth of her eyes made what she had to say that much worse. “I know you went to see her today... I did too.”

“What do you mean?” he rasped, suddenly wanting to throw up.

“Keely. I go too, sometimes. On holidays, mostly. I’ve seen your name in the visitor log. I—I saw it there today, from this morning.”

“Don’t say her name.” Finnick reached out his hand to push her away, his fingers brushing the skin of her stomach, but instead of doing what he wanted them to do, his hand held onto her, gripping her by the hip. “Please don’t say her name.”

“Finnick,” Annie whispered. “It wasn’t your fault...”

“Don’t—” he warned her, dangerously close to crying. “Don’t you fucking pity me.” He released her, swimming as far away as he could from her—not far enough. If he could, he’d swim to the edge of the earth, across the Pacific Ocean, he’d keep swimming until his muscles locked up and his body gave out and he could no longer tread water... and then he’d let himself sink, slowly down, down, to some dark place even the sunlight couldn’t touch. To whatever place she lived now, wherever a person’s consciousness goes when it’s abandoned their body. He heard it burned when a person drowned, and that seemed fitting too, since it was the last thing she’d ever felt, the flames licking at her.

Annie swam up beside him, holding onto the edge of the pool with both hands to root herself in place, refusing to give him space.

“How do I know you?” he croaked. “How—how did she know you? Were you two friends?”

“Not exactly.”

“What do you mean ‘not exactly’? Why would you go see her if you hadn’t been her friend?”

“Because everyone, no matter what they’ve done, deserves to be loved.”

The sound he made was inhuman, like an animal choking on its own tongue, and he turned his head away so she wouldn’t see him cry. He wanted to blame his weakness, the rawness that he felt in his chest every time someone mentioned her name, on the alcohol or this long, never-ending day—but it would be a lie.

The pain came from watching her die a little more every day.

Everyone else seemed to have forgotten her—had gone on with their lives, gone to college and found their careers, had fallen in love and married and built their families and futures, while her life was reduced to a never-ending series of blips and beeps, a withered, atrophied body, and vacant blue eyes that he could look into but that would never look back at him. And it was so rare now to hear anyone say her name, he’d almost forgotten the way it sounded.

He had loved her so much, and she had loved him, and now she was gone without being gone, tethered to the gray space between life and death, and he’d tethered himself there too.

“You don’t have to forget her, you know,” Annie said, her voice echoing off the tiles. “I haven’t. I… won’t.”

He forced himself to take a deep breath, feeling so much lighter beneath the surface of the water than he did above it—the appeal, he guessed, of drowning. “How do I know you?” he asked again.

Annie sighed, and wiped at her forehead, tracks of water coursing down her face like tears. “I went to Plutarch High. And… Seneca Middle… and Alma Elementary…”

Finnick looked at her, scouring her face for something he remembered about her, but came up blank. “Fuck. We went to school together since we were six? I… I don’t remember you.”

She worked at the grout between the pool tiles with the edge of her thumbnail, smiling sadly at it instead of him. “No kidding.”

“I _wish_ I did,” he said, surprised it was the truth.

He didn’t know why he’d told her that.

He shouldn’t have told her that.

She looked at him, her green eyes searching for the lie, and when she didn’t see one, she leaned forward and kissed his cheek.

“That was sweet of you to say,” she told him.

His world spun and quaked, and he could feel the tsunami hurtling toward him, threatening to overtake him. “And you were on the swim team too.”

She shrugged. “The girl’s one, anyway. It’s not like you were the captain of that.”

No. But Keely had been.

“And you two weren’t friends?” It made no sense to him, why Keely wouldn’t have adored Annie, someone who was funny and honest and sincere and a little bit mad.

“I would have liked to be,” Annie admitted. “But I think it might have been a little too obvious that I looked up to her. It’s not that I was jealous of her,” she quickly added, “not really. I mean…” she looked at Finnick from beneath her eyelashes, “I wouldn’t have minded trading places with her about... one or two things.” She looked down at herself, seeming to remember that, aside from a scrap of underwear, they were naked. “But I admired her. And you know how that can be… it can be... grating or… I don’t know… creepy to people, having someone admire them. And that’s okay.”

“No,” Finnick shook his head, pissed at himself and pissed at Keely too. Fucking high school politics. “That’s not okay.”

“Yeah, it really is.” Annie rested a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Besides, we were so young then. Being young is making mistakes, learning from them, and coming into your own.”

But that’s not what being young had been for Keely. That was all she’d had—the whole of her life—being a kid who’d fucked up and made mistakes and never had the chance to learn from any of them. He wondered what kind of woman she’d be today if she’d have the chance, if she would have talked and laughed with Annie on that ratty old couch, catching up like old friends year after year. He wondered if she would have seen her at all, or if she would have been invisible to her like Annie had been to him.

“Not everyone gets a second chance,” he said, thankful he’d finally noticed her after so many years.

“No,” Annie agreed. “And that sucks, but guess what?”

Finnick sighed and looked at her, holding her gaze, wanting to drown in it now instead of the unforgiving ocean. “What?”

“We _do_ have that chance.”

“Annie,” he warned her. “You can’t fix me.”

“I know,” she said with a smile, pushing off the wall and swimming away from him toward the ladder. “Because for that to happen, you’d need to be broken.”

She effortlessly climbed up the ladder, her smooth, toned muscles carrying the extra weight, adjusting without thought to the burden of being on land again, and Finnick stared in awe, transfixed by the beauty of that. She made picking herself up look ten times easier than it had been for her to fall in.

“I like that you don’t want me to lie to you,” he heard himself say, and maybe he’d hate himself for that confession in the morning along with everything else, but with the way she was looking at him, he couldn’t bring himself right now to care.

“Speaking of being honest with each other…. There’s something I’ve been looking forward to doing for a long time.” In the quiet of the room he could hear the water dripping off Annie, landing in noisy splats on the cement floor. She wrung out her hair and tossed it over her shoulder, rivulets of water cascading down her exposed breasts, down the valley between them and over her tight abdomen. She looked like a masterpiece, some painting that Peeta had pointed out to him in some gallery in Italy and that Finnick had mocked and dismissed as old, dusty bullshit until this exact second.

“Oh yeah? What’s that?” His eyes dragged a path along the curves of her body, hungry again for her, his cock twitching at the thought of pushing into her, feeling her warm body enveloping him.

“Well, do you remember that one time senior year—” she walked over to their clothes and rustled through the pile until she found her white dress. She smoothed it out and slipped it over her head, the fabric becoming translucent as it absorbed the water from her body, her nipples visible through the dress even from across the room. “—When the boy’s swim team played that prank on the girl’s team?”

“You’ll have to be a little more specific, Princess. We got into our share of trouble.” He began to paddle toward the ladder, adult swim obviously over for the night.

She laughed as she toed her flats onto each foot and shrugged her coat back on. “Well, it’s really funny, actually, in hindsight, but it wasn’t so much at the time...”

His hands froze on the metal of the ladder, gripping the rungs as the panic hit him. Speechlessly, he listened to her continue, already knowing what she was going to say.

—It turns out there was something he remembered about Annie, after all. In a way.

“Remember,” she said with a smirk, “when the boys stole all the girls’ clothes from the locker room while we were in the showers?”

He shook his head. The girl was diabolical, and definitely a little mad. Maybe she was someone he could even love. “Don’t.”

But she did.

Before he could lift himself out of the water she’d scooped up all their clothes from the table and run toward the door of the pool room, laughing gleefully with every footfall. As his feet finally touched the cement, she’d reached the door and unlocked it, and by the time he’d grabbed a sock to put over his dick, she’d already escaped into the hallway, squealing so loudly with laughter he knew half the floor would be awake as potential witnesses to the chase.

He didn’t give a fuck what they might see if they bothered to look, though—two people, having the time of their lives.

“Annie!” he yelled, chasing her, and when she laughed harder at the sound of her name, he yelled it again and again, laughing too.

He saw her ahead of him, running down the basement hallway, shrieking as he drew closer and closer. His dick slapped against his thighs, back and forth, back and forth with every pace, and when she looked over her shoulder, her grin stretching across her face so wide it could span the ocean, he felt his blood stampeding to his groin, rushing for her, wanting _her_.

He felt young and alive and foolish, and he laughed, his stomach aching from the force of it. Behind him he heard a door groan open, a woman’s voice bitching at his back until she saw his bare ass and broke off with a gasp.

Annie pulled a key card out of her coat pocket, holding it to the keypad to open a door. When she looked at him, her cheeks flushed pink, she looked so alive it hurt him to think that she’d leave him tomorrow and go on, breathing, without him.

It wouldn’t end well, in the long run. It couldn’t.

People died every day, whether or not you let them go.

But that didn’t matter to him. Because for once he wasn’t running away from someone.

He was running toward them—

To Annie.


	4. Epilogue: New Year’s Day (…One Year Later)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A shout out to my betas and dear friends dandelion-sunset, eala-musings, everlylark, and jennagill for all your support and guidance! I love you guys. Thank you for everything you do and are. <3
> 
> And thank you to everyone who took the time to read this story along the way and to send me notes, reviews, comments, or kudos. That sort of feedback is such a boost, and it inspires me to keep going. If you've enjoyed the story, drop me a line. I'd love to hear from you. I'm also on tumblr as papofglencoe. 
> 
> Cheers,   
> Caryn

It felt like he’d barely seen her all day.

Sure, he’d had the opportunity to stare at her in church during the never-ending, hour-long ceremony. And he’d made the most of it—from the moment her tiny frame passed through the towering doors and up the aisle to where he was standing in front of the altar, he’d harbored more profane thoughts than he could recall about what he’d like to do to the body beneath that beautiful dress she was wearing. Delly had said during her reading that love was always patient—but that did nothing to explain why he was overcome with the urge to find the nearest unsanctified space to ruck her dress over her narrow hips and push himself inside of her, taking her roughly but kissing her gently, coaxing the sounds out of her that would tell the world she was _taken_ and _loved_.

Whatever contact they were allowed in church was too fleeting, too insubstantial, too silent to count as seeing her—no more than a tease. Without having the chance to talk to her, it felt too uncomfortably close to what their lives had been like before she’d knocked on Thom and Delly’s bathroom door and changed everything. It reminded him what it felt like to be hollow and incomplete, to have nothing more than aching need for the one person he couldn’t touch. Her hand lightly resting on his arm as they walked back down the aisle together could never be enough, when what he wanted was all four of her limbs wrapped around him, holding him so close there wasn’t a molecule of space left between them, panting endearments at each other until there were no words left to speak between them either.

After the mass, they’d had a few minutes together in the sacristy during the signing of the marriage license, approximately one hundred and eighty seconds of stolen kisses and sweetly whispered words. At least he’d gotten to tell her how stunning she looked, how perfect and gorgeous and thoroughly fuckable she was (he’d gotten her to blush with that, still easy to do after a year together)—not like that was news, but it always seemed like news to her.

Then there were the photos, and the cocktail hour spent bullshitting with the same people they always bullshitted with about the same exact bullshit, and then the toasts—Katniss had surprised the room by crying the hardest of anyone, and when Peeta had insisted on kissing her tears away, salty tears that made him want to lick her entire body, the room had erupted with claps and wolf-whistles and groans of ‘get a room!’ Then there was the dinner spent yelling across the oversized table to their friends in an attempt to hold a conversation while Katniss’ hand covertly made its way from his knee to his crotch, silently reminding him that she was there beside him, wanting him too.

Then there was the cake cutting and the never-ending series of formal dances… the first dance, the father/daughter dance, the mother/son dance, the wedding party dance, the _blahblahblahwhyaretheystilldoingthistous_ dance, and by the time the floor opened and Katniss was engulfed in a sea of her girlfriends, all he wanted was to call it a night, say goodbye to their friends, and take the girl he’d somehow convinced to spend the rest of her life with him upstairs to their room so that he could recommence spending the rest of his life showing her how he planned to repay that faith in him.

It wasn’t that he was ungrateful to be surrounded by the friends he loved, and that loved him. It’s that he wanted to spend a few minutes with his best friend, the person he loved most. That didn’t seem too terribly much to ask.

But weddings were cruel paradoxes. What was supposed to be a celebration of a couple’s love—the epitome of the union between two people—most often turned out to be nothing more than an ostentatious circus designed to prevent any real intimacy between them—or anyone else, for that matter.

So the second he saw Katniss break away from her friends on the dance floor and head to the dessert table to pilfer a second slice of wedding cake, he made his excuses to Thom and Delly, handed their son back to them, and hauled ass across the crowded room, bobbing and weaving past familiar faces as best as he could to avoid getting pulled into another conversation.

The dress Katniss had chosen was strapless, showcasing her slender shoulders, and the pale fabric was a perfect contrast to her smooth and flawless skin. She’d had her hair styled for the wedding—she’d called it an “updo” or something like that—an intricate arrangement of twisting braids and strategically placed wisps that made her look like she’d stepped out of a Renaissance painting. All put together, she looked like a wingless angel or a long-forgotten earth goddess, a sacred being that deserved to be worshipped profanely.

Peeta came up behind Katniss, placing a hand on her hip, right where she liked him to hold her, and stooped down, brushing his lips against the faint white scar on her neck. She instantly melted at his familiar touch, her body sagging against his chest.

“I like what they did to your hair,” he murmured, dragging his lips from the nape of her neck along to the column, and then up, up to her ear. He smiled and whispered a little filth at her. “But I’m gonna like it even better when it’s wrapped around my fist.”

She half-laughed, half-groaned, as embarrassed by the dirty talk as she was turned on by it. Katniss pressed herself against him, getting closer, so he pressed back. “Hey, stranger,” she exhaled. By now Peeta knew every note out of her mouth, every tone and sound she was capable of making. Right now she was tired but happy.

“Something told me I’d find you over here, hunting for snacks.” He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pressed another kiss to her neck, smiling when he felt the goosebumps pepper her skin. He had that effect on her, somehow, the same way she had on him. It was nothing short of a miracle.

“Yeah, well being the maid of honor is a thankless job, let me tell you. It doesn’t have any of the glory of Best Man and requires three times the effort. You work up one hell of an appetite,” she joked.

“For...” he prompted teasingly, knowing that, for as much as she liked hearing his dirty talk, she was miserable at dishing it out.

She cleaved through the cake on her plate with her fork, taking a massive bite before answering so that she’d be hard to understand. “Cake,” she said—or might have said—subtly shifting her ass to rub it against his half-hard cock.

He chuckled. “Lucky for you, you get to have both. Here. Can I?” He reached down and took the fork from her hand, cutting off another bite and then bringing it up as if to feed her. At the last moment his hand veered to the left, and he shoveled the cake into his own mouth, and with a mouth full of sugar and frosting, he planted a triumphant peck on her cheek.

“So that’s how you’re playing it, Mellark.”

Christ, he loved when they bantered. It was by far the sexiest thing about her—her willingness to wrestle with him in all the ways that felt good. “You really want me to be _that_ guy who hand-feeds his girl? Because I will, but…”

She laughed before he could even finish the thought. “No. I don’t think we’re quite that sickening yet.”

“ _Yet_.” He dropped the fork back onto the plate so that he could brush his hand over her collarbone. It couldn’t be helped—he wanted to find the nearest service hallway or coat closet and drag her into it. He needed to be inside her more than he needed air to breath. “I’ve kind of missed you today,” he admitted a little guiltily. He knew that was needy of him, but today was an important milestone for them, one he would have rather marked naked in bed with her for the whole of the day than like this, as significant as the wedding had been.

“I know,” she sighed. “But tomorrow… is all ours.”

His cock swelled at the thought, his heart swelling too, every ineffable part of him swelling along with his body from the thought of being with her.

Playfully, so he didn’t do something stupid like cry in a crowded reception hall over how much he loved her, he reached down and swiped his finger through the frosting, smudging it on the tip of Katniss’ nose.

“Peeta,” she grumbled, swiping at it with her forefinger and then leaning forward—out of his arms—to grab a cocktail napkin from the stack on the dessert table.

“Here, I got that for you.” He spun her around and kissed the tip of her nose, a sweet, wet, full-lipped kiss he tempered with a tiny nibble of his teeth. Then he took her hand and raised it to his mouth, drawing the tip of her index finger in to suck it clean with his tongue.

Her breath caught as he rubbed his tongue against the pad of her finger and scraped his teeth against her flesh. “Jesus fuck, let’s get out of here,” she whispered hoarsely, her pupils so dark and deep they looked like tunnels to a coal mine hidden far below the earth, a secret place where she hid all her passion and that only he knew how to find.

They’d just linked hands to sneak away when Gale and Cressida walked up to them. Peeta resisted the urge to groan, but Katniss didn’t quite succeed. He squeezed her hand, desperately trying not to laugh at the growl that emanated from her chest.

“Gale,” she said, but it sounded the same as “damn you.”

“Hey, Catnip… Peet.” Gale nodded and gave them each a brief hug, a stiff, thumping sort of motion that felt more like a burping than a greeting. Cressida opted for a wry half-smile instead, wrapping her arm around Gale’s waist.

“It’s good seeing you guys,” Peeta said. “I wasn’t sure you were going to make it. How’s the Windy City treating you?”

“So far, so good. They’ve got me assigned to the 9th District, and I’m working with some of the kids at Dearborn Homes too, as outreach, for the department. So the work is good.”

Peeta couldn’t help noticing the way Cressida’s hand clutched Gale’s waist as he spoke about his job. Possessive, protective, proud—it reminded him so much of the way Katniss held onto him. His eyes flitted over to the dance floor, where the bride and groom were dancing, Annie’s hands clutching onto Finnick the exact same way.

All their eyes followed the path of Peeta’s, and the four of them stood in silence for a moment, observing the way Finnick smiled adoringly down at his wife like she was a lighthouse on an otherwise unlit shore. And then, at the same time they all spoke—

“He couldn’t have done better for himself,” Peeta remarked.

“‘Operation Hit It and Quit It,’ my ass,” Gale said.

“What kind of asshole gets married on New Year’s Day?” Cressida bitched.

“I’m so happy for them,” Katniss sighed.

No one seemed to hear what anyone else had said, each of them lost in the sight of Finnick spinning Annie and then pulling her close, dipping her by the waist, and then kissing her like she was the source of all his oxygen. Which they knew, of course, she was, and so it was impossible not to watch—like one person performing CPR on another, you had to witness the heroism and beauty in it, the determination of the rescuer and that first, startled gasp of the rescued.

“It was a hell of a wedding,” Gale said, looking between Katniss and Peeta. “You two planning one of these for yourselves?”

“Um, well…” Katniss began, her face flushing in discomfort.

Peeta swooped in to bail her out. “Nope. No plans.” He reached an arm out and reeled her in tightly to his side, rubbing his thumb along the bare skin of her shoulder. Pointing between Gale and his girlfriend, he asked, “What about you two?”

Cressida barked out a laugh. “Mr. John Law over here works every day in the system, processing people, enforcing rules, maintaining law and order… and all that is necessary, I’ll grant you. But what’s the law have to do with love?” She snorted. “No thanks. It can stay out of my bedroom.”

There was no mistaking the defiant gleam in Gale’s eyes. “I’m working on her,” he said.

“Well, you’re going to have to work a whole lot harder on me, is what I’m saying.” Cressida bit her lip, toying with her lip piercing.

“Oh, I can handle that,” he said to her in a low voice—a promise or a threat, Peeta couldn’t be sure.

“Good luck with that,” Peeta laughed, more eager than ever to get away, “And on that note, I think me and Katniss are gonna call it a night.”

“Already?” Gale lifted an eyebrow and pulled out his phone. “It’s not even midnight, Old Spice.”

At the mention of midnight, Peeta’s pulse spiked. He’d been there for his best friend all day, and so had Katniss. But tomorrow belonged to them and no one else.

“Yeah, I’m beat,” he lied easily, sleep the last thing on his mind.

At that, Katniss and Peeta said goodnight to Cressida and Gale, each couple making empty promises to see each other soon, knowing that the next time, if they were lucky, would probably be at Thom and Delly’s New Year’s Eve party at the end of the year. Then they ducked out of the hall holding hands, smiling and waving to their friends as they passed, but not stopping to say goodbye.

They didn’t walk to their room—

They pushed and pulled each other, stumbled and jogged, blindly groping and falling their way there as their hands and lips and arms and teeth found their way, again and again, to each other. In the privacy of the elevator Peeta hiked one of Katniss’s legs around his waist, smiling into her mouth as the fabric of her bridesmaid’s dress loudly ripped along the length of her thigh.

“Guess… won’t be… wearing… this… again…” she gasped around his kisses as he ground himself against her center.

He smiled back, lapping his tongue greedily against hers, eager to fuck her with his mouth but settling for what he could get at the moment. His fingers made their way to the crotch of her panties, impatiently pulling the damp fabric aside to rub the sensitive skin of her clit. “After I’m done with your dress, the only thing it’ll be good for is running up the flagpole,” he teased—but really promised—watching in awe as Katniss’ head fell back against the wall of the elevator, her face making the same blissed out expression she had the first time he’d touched her in Thom and Delly’s basement bathroom. Her hips bucked against his hand, riding him, as he palmed her roughly, slipping two fingers inside of her and then curling them, urging her to moan his name. Which she did, again and again, with such abandon it was like she’d forgotten they weren’t the only two people in the world.

...Nothing like putting on a good show for the security cameras.

“Come on,” he said in a husky voice as the elevator arrived at their floor, grabbing her hand with the one he’d just dipped inside of her, his palm and fingers covering her hand with her own arousal. “I’ve got something I want to give to you.”

“Cake?” she joked breathlessly, her face and chest already mottled bright pink from her hard breathing.

He forced himself to behave as they walked the length of the hall to their room, Peeta pulling Katniss behind him so quickly she had to half-run to keep up. But the instant they were back inside their room, he pushed her against the door, and his hands were on her again, impatiently lifting her dress, his thumbs hooking under the waistband of her panties to yank them down over her ass and past her thighs. When they slipped to her ankles, she kicked them off one foot at a time, and Peeta sank to the ground to take off her heels. One of Katniss’ hands fell to his shoulder for balance as he unstrapped one heel, then the next, coaxing them off her tired feet. He’d massage them later for her, but for now he had one goal, and it was to bury his face directly in the apex of her thighs.

His hands slid up along her floor-length dress, and when his fingers found the torn seam along her right thigh, he roughly tore at it, pulling the fabric so hard it ripped across her upper thigh, effectively tearing the lower half of the dress off the front. The fabric dangled uselessly along her left leg, which he hitched over his shoulder for better access.

“Watch me,” he told her, his eyes looking up and locking on her beautiful gray eyes.

Then, exactly like he’d done one year ago today, he began making love to her with his mouth—if you can call it making love. It was the tender, reverent part of what they’d done that night, anyway—and of what he planned to do to her again tonight—before he’d turned her around, told her to brace herself against the wall, and then fucked her so hard, so urgently, they’d both sank to the floor in a spent, heaving puddle of shaking limbs.

She rolled her hips, riding his face, as he lapped at her pussy, drinking in the taste of her. There was nothing like it in the world—nothing sweeter, or stronger, or more intoxicating—than the taste of Katniss on his tongue. He thought he’d loved the taste of her when they first kissed, and then… he’d done _this_ , and it conjured every feral, base instinct in him to devour her.

He’d never really cared either way about eating out women in the past—it was something he had done because it felt good for them, and in making them feel good, he’d gotten satisfaction too. But going down on Katniss was another story altogether. With every gasping, shuddering breath she took, with every twitch and spasm her body made, the way she grew impossibly wetter before crying out his name—it wasn’t just a matter of sexual attraction. She _fed_ him. Her body was a banquet, and he was a slave falling to the ground before her, starved for her.

When she came on his face, he lapped up as much of her arousal as he could, using his tongue to lick her clean, from her clit to her entrance to the smooth skin of her upper thighs, relishing the feel of her fingers knotted in his hair, pulling at the roots to the point of pain, the sound of her voice hoarsely chanting his name over and over, the sight of the sweat beading on her face—sweat mixed with tears because what they had was too much for her to take.

Gently, and then not-so-gently, he wrung wave after wave out of her, pushing her as far as he could take her, until her knees buckled and she sank down the door, her bare ass unceremoniously landing on the carpet.

“This carpet’s got to be so dirty, but at least it’s not cold like the slate was,” she laughed weakly, pulling Peeta in to kiss him, moaning as she tasted herself, sliding her tongue along his to feel the marriage of her slickness to his saliva.

“I love you,” she whispered, wiping off his chin with the scrap of her dress. As soon as she said it, Peeta pulled away and looked over his shoulder, glancing at the time.

“It’s 12:05,” he said, his voice still an octave lower from his desire to crawl inside her. “You know what that means?”

Katniss smiled, and a thousand fireworks went off, louder and brighter than the Chinese New Year. “It’s January 2.”

“It’s January 2,” he agreed, nodding and smiling. “Happy anniversary.”

She reached out and ran her fingers through the hair at the nape of his neck, toying with the strands. He leaned into her touch like a well-loved dog, his eyelids going half-mast for a moment while he relished the simple intimacy of the gesture.

“Happy anniversary,” she said back to him, leaning in and kissing him again—a sweet peck on the lips, the kind of kiss a bride plants on her husband at the goading of all her wedding guests to silence the noisy clinking of their silverware on their drinking glasses.

“I’ve got something I want to give to you,” Peeta said.

“I thought you just did,” she laughed.

He laughed and made a mock face of disapproval. “Please… that’s as much for me, and you know it.” Peeta stood and reached his hands out, hauling Katniss up onto her feet, and then guided her to the foot of the king-size bed, where he encouraged her to take a seat. “Wait here. Gimme a sec.”

He rummaged through his overnight bag until he found what he was looking for, and then pulled out a small package, handing it to her.

She frowned at its size and shape. “This isn’t a ring, is it?”

“No, no… I know we agreed we weren’t going to wear them. It’s just a little something else I picked up,” he lied. He poked at her hand. “Go on. Open it.”

“Peeta…” Her voice was dark and disapproving as she toyed with the gift wrap on the box, her finger tracing the pattern—little golden arrows on a background of forest green. As soon as he’d seen it, he knew it was perfect for their anniversary. It reminded him of the dress she’d been wearing that night… and of her tattoo. At the thought, he reached out and grabbed her hand, kissing her wrist right where the tattoo was—which now included the letters “P” and “M” on each side of the arrow’s fletchings—a reminder he’d gotten under her skin too.

“...I can already tell this is too much,” she protested, pulling her hand away. “The first anniversary is paper.” She peeled off the gift wrap and held it up between two fingers. “ _This_ is paper. _This_ —” she held up with her free hand what was clearly a jewelry box, “is cheating.”

“Hey, I haven’t cheated,” he laughed. “Technically, paper is involved.”

“Still,” she grumbled with a scowl, opening the box and gasping at its contents.

Peeta thought he knew the night he first kissed her what loving Katniss Everdeen was. He thought he knew in the morning, when over breakfast he’d asked her if she wanted to do one more crazy thing and marry him and she’d laughed, looking surprised at herself for considering it, and answered “for real?” He thought he knew when, as soon as the courthouse opened on January 2, they’d stood hand in hand and he promised to love and cherish her, forsaking all others, in sickness and in health, until the day he died.

And Peeta did love her then, with all of his being—it wasn’t that he hadn’t. It was that now he loved her more, so much more— _impossibly_ , _infinitely_ more. Every day that passed, he found himself loving her in new and unexpected ways. A single smile could do it, invoke in him the sense that he was tumbling headlong over a cliff, his stomach in his throat, the wind rushing past his face. Or maybe it was a scowl or a sneeze or one of her horribly burnt and inedible dinners… she was like a vine wrapping itself around him, their roots growing together until there was no _you_ and _me_ , only _we_.

She held the locket in her palm and visibly fought the urge to cry, and the senseless bravery of that act made him love her even more.

“It’s beautiful.” Her fingers traced the art nouveau pattern on the rose gold face of the locket, the gentle scrolls reminding him of the plaits of her braided hair. When her finger caught on the clasp and she realized it wasn’t just a necklace, she looked up at him in surprise, her eyes as luminous as the harvest moon.

“Go on—look,” he chuckled nervously, eager for her to see the real gift.

She lost the battle against herself when she saw the miniature hand-painted portraits he’d placed inside—one was of Katniss with her little sister, one of maybe five people in the world they’d shared the news of their marriage with, from the night they’d celebrated Katniss’ birthday on the weekend of Cinco de Mayo. The two sisters had gotten plowed on a massive margarita they’d shared—it must have had half a gallon of tequila in it—while wearing sombreros. The other portrait was from a picture he’d taken with Katniss outside the IHOP on New Year’s Day, Katniss holding up and pointing to her bare ring finger in excitement. Peeta had wrapped one arm around her neck, kissing her cheek, and had snapped the picture to remember the morning he somehow got everything he’d always wanted.

At the sight of the portraits, Katniss started bawling messy, fat, crocodile tears, her face scrunching up in a way that could only be called adorable but that she always insisted on calling ugly.

“My gift to you sucks!” she wailed, snapping the locket shut and clasping it to her chest. “Leave it to you to be f-fucking perfect!”

“That’s not even a little bit true,” he laughed, wiping away her tears with her thumbs, “and you know it.”

“Well, you’re perfect for me,” she said in a fractitious voice, eager to defend him even to himself. She placed the locket back in its box and got up, taking it to her luggage and tucking it away inside one of the inner compartments. She was still crying softly, which was making whatever she was trying to do with her purse extremely difficult.

Peeta walked up behind her and kissed the crown of her head, then began sifting through her hair to remove the bobby pins. “Take your time,” he murmured when she began to curse, frantically looking through her wallet for whatever it is she wanted to give him. “I can always take a personal check if you didn’t bring enough cash,” he teased. “That still counts as paper.”

Katniss laughed, the tension easing from her shoulders. “Here it is,” she whispered in relief, wiping her nose with the back of her hand and taking out a folded up scrap of paper from among the hundreds of old receipts and post-it notes she’d jammed inside her wallet.

Peeta removed what appeared to be the last of the bobby pins, running his fingers over her scalp to check for any stragglers. His wife’s hair hung around her shoulders in a wavy, hairsprayed mess—perfect for pulling.

“What you got there?” he asked, rapidly losing interest in the gift exchange now that the thought of pushing her onto all fours and taking her from behind had entered his mind.

Katniss turned around and held it up to him, a wistful look on her face. “It—ah—isn’t much. It’s shit, actually, compared to—”

He pressed a finger to her lips. “Stop. I’m going to love whatever it is…” He took the scrap of paper from her, “...even if it was a receipt from Dunkin’ Donuts… as long as it came with the donuts.”

Peeta unfolded the paper, frowning as he tried to make sense of what he was reading. The note was filled with Katniss’ messy, scrawling writing, which was hard enough to decipher without having any context for what he was trying to interpret. It appeared to be a to-do list:

_Get back into archery_

_Call mom once a week (EVERY week or it doesn’t count)_

_Don’t be such an antisocial asshole aka go out more you antisocial asshole_

_Learn Spanish_

_Ask for a promotion ($$$)_

_And the big one, so don’t fuck it up..._

_Talk to Peeta (say sth intelligent for fuckssake) _

Peeta’s heart stuttered in his chest, skipping one beat, then several, then racing to catch up to the rest of his body. Over the pounding in his ears he heard Katniss exhale nervously. He reached out and took her hand without looking at her, his eyes going over the list over and over again to make sure he’d read everything right.

He knew for a fact that in the past year she’d renewed her membership at the local archery club, had downloaded (and opened a grand total of five times) a Rosetta Stone software program on Beginner’s Spanish, had called her mother every Sunday before she’d let him touch her (as her reward), and she had asked—and been denied—a promotion at work.

His lips quirked up into a smile. These were her New Year’s resolutions from last year.

“Say something intelligent to me, huh?”

She squirmed where she stood, her hand shaking in his. Grand pronouncements, open-hearted proclamations, the confessions of her innermost desires… these were inimical to her nature. He knew what this note cost her, even after a year of marriage.

He smiled and made it easy for her, like he always would. “Well, I guess there’s always next year.”

“Hey,” she laughed, pulling her hand out of his and pushing at his chest. He grabbed it, pressing it tighter to him so she could feel how hard his heart was beating for her.

“It’s the perfect gift,” he said. Leaning forward, he captured her lower lip with his, kissing and then tugging at the soft, supple flesh. “I love you.”

He opened his eyes to look at her—he always loved studying her face after kissing her—and her eyes drifted open, staring into his from a range so close he knew she could read every last thought on his mind.

He told her anyway, because he knew how she liked it. “But that’s not going to stop me from fucking your brains out.”

She stepped back, reaching behind her to unzip her dress. As her arms fell to her sides, the fabric cascaded down her body, leaving her standing in the corner of the hotel room in nothing but her strapless bra. Turning around, she braced her hands on the wall, spreading her legs apart in invitation. She looked at him over her shoulder and arched an eyebrow.

“That's exactly what I'm counting on.”

 

 

 

 

Finis.


End file.
